Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Classics

These masterly poems span the whole of Nabokov's career from "Music", written in 1914, to the short, playful "To Vera", composed in 1974. The works are newly translated by Dmitiri Nabokov, and include "The University Poem", an extraordinary autobiographical poem in which Nabokov recalls his life in Cambridge, with its crooked alleys and age-old gates, teas at the vicar's and British girls. Included to are such poems as "To Russia" ("Will you leave me alone! I implore you!), the enchanting "Eve", and verse about America, sport, love, and poetry itself.

Listen to a collection of classic stories by the world's most beloved writers. Here are the complete stories, unabridged, for you and your family to enjoy together this Christmas and for many Christmases to come. Family favorites and remembered treasures are in this collection, as well as a few light-hearted surprises.

Nabokov’s fourth novel, The Eye, is as much a farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Smurov, a lovelorn, excruciatingly self-conscious Russian émigré living in pre-war Berlin, commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer even greater indignities in the afterlife as he searches for proof of his existence among fellow émigrés who are too distracted to pay him any heed.

Born in Brooklyn, Sammy Gregg is small in stature and naive to the ways of the world, yet headstrong and resolute to save enough money to marry Susie Mitchell. Gregg calculates that he needs $15‚000 and figures he can earn enough in six months out west. Although he is a small man who knows nothing of fighting‚ guns‚ or horses‚ he takes his $5‚000 in savings and heads west‚ arriving in Munson‚ a tough, lawless town.

Feeling a chill amidst the warmth of the season? Sensing a shadow lurking behind the tinsel and lights? Experience the darker visions hidden within our brightest holiday. Come listen to the water ghost's story as she spends Christmas Eve haunting Harrowby Hill.

The first of the Sherlock Holmes stories, this was also the first of Conan Doyle's books to be published. In this fascinating and exciting tale, the two towering creations of detective fiction--Holmes, the master of the science of detection, and Watson, his faithful companion--make their auspicious debut. The two detectives are immediately in fine form as Holmes plucks the solution to the mystery from the heart of Victorian London.

Amateur sleuth and restless spirit Pascha gets the chance of a post-lifetime when a reporter turns up dead. Detective Gregor Kreidler - a friend of Pascha's crime-fighting partner, coroner Martin Gänsewein - tops the list of suspects for the murder of Susanne Hauschild, who also happens to be Gregor's ex-wife. Martin already has his hands full with his girlfriend - who's ready to give birth any day - and he's too distracted to comb the streets, so Pascha decides to play ghost cop with gusto.

Published at the height of the McCarthy era, Norman Mailer's audacious novel of socialism is at once an elegy and an indictment, a sinuous moral thriller and an intellectual slugfest. Wounded during World War II, Mike Lovett is an amnesiac, and much of his past is a secret to himself. But when Lovett rents a room in Brooklyn, he finds that his housemates have secrets of their own: one betrays a husband no one ever sees; another may have been a Communist executioner.

Each story explores a different twist of madness, murder, and melancholy, from the horror of being buried alive in "The Fall of the House of Usher" to the desperate case of two gruesome killings in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." The heartbeat of paranoia in "The Tell-Tale Heart," the razor-sharp claustrophobia in "The Pit and the Pendulum," and a mourner's torment in "The Raven" reveal - and revel in - life's creepiest and craziest. These tales are not for the faint of heart or the thin of skin.

Jacob Flanders is a uniquely ambiguous protagonist: he is defined almost entirely by others’ impressions and is nearly unknowable as a result - but that does not at all detract from the vitality of Virginia Woolf’s story. In her experimental first novel, she tracks Jacob through the seemingly mundane early years of his life - from a boyhood trip to the Cornwall coast to his college years at Cambridge to his time as an adult in London and Greece - before arriving at his shocking, even tragic, entry into war.

Seven years after the death of Edward Hyde, a stylish gentleman shows up in foggy London claiming to be Dr. Henry Jekyll. Only Mr. Utterson, Jekyll’s faithful lawyer and confidant, knows that he must be an impostor - because Jekyll was Hyde. But as the man goes about charming Jekyll’s friends and reclaiming the estate, and as the bodies of potential challengers start piling up, Utterson is left fearing for his life, and questioning his own sanity.

While it lived, the tamarind tree stood at the crossroads of a small village in Southern India. For more than fifty years it was a benevolent observer, offering shade without discrimination. It bore witness to laughter and tears, to tragedy and simple pleasures, and to the history of the village itself as it transformed from the old ways of bullock-led carts to a bustling community of social, political, economic, and ecological change.

In this exquisite collection of children’s folktales, Zitkála-Šá shares the legends that were handed down to her through generations of Yankton storytellers. These tales display the wide range of insights and observations that accrue to such stories through repeated iteration, but they also benefit from the sharp ear and finely tuned sensibility of Zitkála-Šá as a writer. Her characters seem to speak to us—often crying out to us—in the same tones that Zitkála-Šá must once have heard.

Wynema Harjo is an idealistic young Muscogee woman who finds meaning as a teacher for the young people of her village. After the Wounded Knee Massacre and the subsequent Ghost Dance movement, Wynema feels a need to take further action, and she and her husband adopt a Lakota girl. As the years roll by and injustices mount, Wynema and a fellow teacher, Genevieve Weir, consider the repercussions of the oppression that surrounds them—and wonder how their society might eventually be improved.

Zora Neale Hurston is best remembered today for her work as a novelist, but she was also an accomplished dramatist, short story writer, and folklorist. That range of interests and styles is on full display in this collection.

Inspired by real-life characters and events, Willa Cather’s historical novel follows the committed efforts of two friends, Bishop Jean Marie Latour and Father Joseph Vaillant, to establish a diocese in the newly acquired US territory of New Mexico. Their arduous and picaresque journey is set against a gorgeous landscape of mesas, canyons, and arroyos inhabited by the Pueblo, Hopi, and Navajo people, the place becoming almost another character itself.

On the glistening surface of Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking novel is the Ramsay family, a seemingly stable group of characters, but a group that is ultimately subject to the same alterations and losses that come with the passing of time. Set at the Ramsays’ summerhouse over two September days, ten years apart, Woolf’s influential landmark of twentieth-century literature explores the hopes, frustrations, and small moments of grace and change that permeate everyday life.

In this rambunctious satire, Wallace Thurman, one of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance, takes his fellow artists and critics to task. The setting is a buzzing apartment building in 1930s Harlem, where avatars for the likes of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, and Thurman himself come together to push past old boundaries and test out new ideas. But the heat of this collective energy soon threatens to consume them all, as wild parties, jealous rages, and intellectual conflicts turn the literary circle into an out-of-control hothouse of personal drama.