Modern Classics

During the rainy summer of 1816, the "Year Without a Summer", the world was locked in a long cold volcanic winter caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. Mary Shelley, aged 18, and her lover (and later husband) Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The weather was consistently too cold and dreary that summer to enjoy the outdoor holiday activities they had planned, so the group retired indoors until dawn.

We never forget the stories we were told as children. Even when they are not on the top of our mind, they lurk like palm prints on the drying cement foundations of our understanding of the world. We absorb the pluck of children in the face of adult perfidy, cheering the heroism of Hansel and Gretel or Beauty and the Beast. Counterpoised by the wickedness and cruelty of parents, stepmothers, and wolves in sheep's clothing, children's wiliness usually leaves them unharmed, if not heroic. As adults, we keep returning to them again and again in film, in theater, and in books.

A young couple dream of moving to the Yorkshire Dales, with hilarious consequences Listen now to this delightful comedy from the archive starring Rodney Bewes (The Likely Lads) as David Parkinson, a young husband and a man with big dreams of country life. David and his wife Helen decided to swap...

"Die Welt der Guermantes" ist die des mondänen Paris der Belle Époque. Marcel Proust schildert bis ins Detail die Gesellschaft der Aristokraten, Intellektuellen und Künstler zwischen den Salons der Metropole und den verträumten Strandbädern der Normandie. Doch der eigentliche Gegenstand des Romans bleibt die Zeit, die hinter den alltäglichsten Vorgängen die "Essenz der Dinge" aufleuchten lässt.

The late 16th-century penal debt bond, which allowed an unsatisfied creditor to seize the body of his debtor, set in motion a series of precedents that would shape the legal, philosophical, and moral issue of property-in-person in England and America for centuries. Focusing on this historical juncture at which debt litigation was not merely an aspect of society but seemed to engulf it completely, Of Bondage examines a culture that understood money and the body of the borrower as comparable forms of property that impinged on one another at the moment of default.

Liebe Märchenfreunde, hiermit möchte ich euch mein neues Hörbuch „Alte Märchen neu erzählt“ vorstellen. In diesem zauberhaften Werk habe ich insgesamt 27 klassische Märchen modern umgeschrieben, um sie für die jungen Hörerinnen und Hörer ab dem Grundschulalter neu erlebbar zu machen. Taucht ein in die faszinierende Welt der Gebrüder Grimm mit bekannten Geschichten wie Rotkäppchen, Dornröschen, Rapunzel und Aschenputtel.

In the summer of 1816, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley - the two great poets of their age - and a lovely 17-year-old named Mary Shelley were partying and reading ghost stories on the shores of Lake Geneva. They dared each other to come up with the scariest story. Young Mary was the only one to rise to the challenge, and she gave birth to the entire horror and science fiction genres by crafting a brilliant and chilling account of what it means to be human, what responsibilities we have to each other, and how far we can go in tampering with nature.

Few creatures of horror have seized imaginations and held them for so long as the anguished monster of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The story of Victor Frankenstein's terrible creation and the havoc it caused has enthralled generations of readers and listeners and inspired countless writers of horror and suspense.

Mimei Ogawa, a prolific author of short stories nearly 100 years ago, is considered to be one of the founding figures of modern Japanese children’s literature. He has also been called the Hans Christian Andersen of Japan because of how his works were influenced by Andersen. This collection contains a fresh, modern translation of one of Mimei Ogawa’s most famous works, "The Mermaid and the Red Candles", as well as several other stories that have never been translated and published in English before.

Victor Frankenstein learns how to create life and creates a being in the likeness of man, but larger and more powerful than the average man. Frankenstein rejects the creature, and lives to regret his desire to create life, after it kills his brother William. Frankenstein is a warning against the "over-reaching" of modern man and the Industrial Revolution, alluded to in the novel's subtitle, The Modern Prometheus.

Let yourself be swept away by these classic tales of hope and courage!!

- Classic tales (short stories and poems) of hope and courage from the 19th and 20th centuries

Annotated for modern listeners

The third entry in the Classic Tales series, joining "Classic Tales of Horror" and "Classic Tales of Christmas"

For adventure fans of all ages, these stories are guaranteed to intrigue, delight, and sometimes take you by surprise!

In Psychonomics, Morse uses captivating stories to bring to life the often mystifying world of behavioral psychology. We hear tales of beautiful fashion models and brilliant finance models, of MVP quarterbacks and GDP architects. In all of these stories, Morse shows how modern science uses the most advanced techne and experiments to defeat the human mind, and, ultimately, how the mind wins.

This rediscovered classic from the 1930s tells nine imaginative stories about trains, cars, and other machinery with human personalities. All nine stories are featured and children will delight in these tales of a lazy automobile, a runaway elevator, a hungry steam shovel, and other endearing machines.

Call If You Need Me includes all of the prose previously collected in No Heroics, Please, four essays from Fires, and those five marvelous stories that range over the period of Carver's mature writing and give his devoted fans a final glimpse of the great writer at work. The pure pleasure of Carver's writing is everywhere in his work, here no less than in those stories that have already entered the canon of modern literature.

'An enchanting debut' Woman's Own November 1942 Dear Elizabeth, I've got myself a new project, to cheer myself up a bit. It has absolutely nothing to do with the war effort. We're completely starved of art in London these days. Anything decent was stashed away by the authorities years ago.But...

T.C. Boyle was first feted as a master of the short story for his critically acclaimed Greasy Lake. With these stories applauded by People magazine as "wickedly comical," he displays once again a virtuosity and versatility rare in literary America today. Without a Hero zooms in on American...

In this sequel to Dream of Me, Josie Litton pursues the romantic and political affiliations between the Saxons and the Norse at the end of the ninth century. When the Saxon lord Hawk agrees to take a Norse bride, he finds an unexpected affection for his enigmatic and fiery fiancée, Lady Krysta...

The three Saperstone siblings, who are scattered throughout the country and leading very different lives, are drawn back home to Saratoga, New York, when their mother dies. What they discover there shocks them: she has left behind a much larger estate than they could ever have imagined. The...

"You were named for Elvis. . . . Darlin', did you hear me? You were named for Elvis Presley. Not even your father knows that. Wouldn't you like to share a secret, just you and me?" Simone "Mimi" Page once dated Elvis--and will never let her daughter forget it...

The first novel by Bernhard Schlink since his international best seller The Reader, Homecoming is the story of one man's odyssey and another man's pursuit. A child of World War II, Peter Debauer grew up with his mother and scant memories of his father, a victim of war. Now an adult, Peter...