Showing results by author "Joseph Conrad"

A Signature Performance: Kenneth Branagh plays this like a campfire ghost story, told by a haunted, slightly insane Marlow.

On a becalmed yawl in the Thames estuary, Marlow tells a tale of Africa. His job there is to find the enigmatic Kurtz, but his journey further and further upriver reveals the brutality of the white Imperialists who run the country. Established as one of the great English novels, and a story of mythic power, Heart of Darkness is rich in meaning – allusive, enthralling, and haunting.

Our agent, a man named Mr Verloc, minds his own business while he keeps his shop in London's Soho, alongside his wife, who attends to her aged mother and disabled brother. Their lives are turned upside down when Verloc is reluctantly employed to plant a bomb and destroy an observatory in London. What was once the perfect bomb plot inevitably turns awry and Verloc, his family and his associates are forced to face the consequences.

Joseph Conrad’s multilayered masterpiece tells of one nation's violent revolution and one hero's moral degeneration. Conrad convincingly invents an entire country, Costaguana, and sets it afire as warlords compete for power and a fortune in silver.

Señor Gould, adamant that his silver should not become spoil for his enemies, entrusts it to his faithful longshoreman, Nostromo, a local hero of sorts whom Señor Gould believes to be incorruptible.

Lord Jim tells the story of a young, idealistic Englishman---"as unflinching as a hero in a book"---who is disgraced by a single act of cowardice while serving as an officer on the Patna, a merchant-ship sailing from an eastern port. His life is ruined: an isolated scandal has assumed horrifying proportions. But then he is befriended by an older man named Marlow....

This classic tale of intrigue, mystery and adventure takes place on the ivory harvesting and trade route in the Congo, in the depths of Africa. In this audiobook, Marlow, a sea captain on a ship at anchor, retells a story of his assignment upon a steamer ship in the Congo to a group of his ship mates. During his mission he is asked to retrieve and return Kurtz, an ivory hunter with a resounding reputation where ever his name is mentioned, who delivers more ivory than all the other stations combined, and who has a reverenced effect on the natives.

Jim, the first mate aboard a small steamer named the Patna, travels from port to port in the Pacific Ocean. When the ship hits floating wreckage, Jim and the crew are forced to abandon it, leaving hundreds of ethnic travelers onboard. However, Jim's reprehensible actions are soon discovered by the court, and he is compelled to face his guilt and redeem himself - a journey that leads him to a remote exotic location where he is revered as the Lord, "Tuan Jim".

An astonishing collection of fifty of the greatest short stories ever written by some of literature's most highly acclaimed writers. 1. "Odour of Chrysanthemums" by D. H. Lawrence; 2. "Miss Harriet" by Guy de Maupassant; 3. "Twenty-six Men and a Girl" by Maxim Gorky; 4. "Hot Potatoes" by Arnold Bennett; 5. "Rats" by M. R. James; 6. "Zodomirsky’s Duel" by Alexandre Dumas; 7. "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin; 8. "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe; 9. "The Encased Man" by Anton Chekhov.

Award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti reads this Joseph Conrad classic tale of two white traders, Carlier and Kayerts, comical and pathetic, who move from polite society to the Congo, where they hope to become wealthy on the "Dark Continent" by spreading commerce and civilization to black Africa. But as was often the case, the longer they are away from civilization, the more the refinements of civilization slip away, along with their sanity.

In fading light on the Thames Estuary near London, as Charles Marlow and his companions relax on deck, waiting for the turn of the tide, he tells of the time he turned ‘freshwater sailor’ on the River Congo. His perilous journey upriver in a little steamboat with a band of white colonialists and a group of cannibals takes him closer to the coveted ivory, closer to Kurtz the rogue agent, closer to certain unspeakable rites and the heart of darkness.

Relish the wonders of Classic Literature in B.J. Harrison’s second season of The Classic Tales Podcast. Experience more of the greatest fiction ever written, as it comes to life in this unprecedented audiobook. Adventure from Jack London and Edgar Rice Burroughs, gothic suspense from Wilkie Collins and Edgar Allan Poe, humor from Mark Twain and P.G. Wodehouse - this collection has it all, complete and unabridged.

The story of the enigmatic Kurtz and his outpost in deepest Congo is superbly narrated by the gifted Ralph Cosham. Also included is The Lagoon, a story of courage and love in the South Pacific.

In the late 19th century, a sea captain on his first voyage in the Gulf of Siam, on an unfamiliar ship, with a crew of strangers, takes aboard a fugitive stowaway. He must conceal his presence from the sailors with whom he shares this ship, and so he and the stowaway become conspirators. The young captain must challenge his own morality and the sworn obligations of a sea captain. He must decide who he wants to be as a man and as a moral actor in the arduous undertaking of endeavoring to deliver this fugitive to safety.

Heart of Darkness tells of Charles Marlow, an Englishman who took a foreign assignment from a Belgian trading company as a ferry-boat captain in Africa. Marlow is employed to transport ivory downriver. However, his more pressing assignment is to return Kurtz, another ivory trader, who has been rumored ill, to his homeland, in a cover-up.

Although Heart of Darkness was one of the first literary texts to provide a critical view of European imperial activities, it was initially read by critics as anything but controversial. While the book was generally admired, it was typically seen either as a condemnation of a certain type of adventurer who could easily take advantage of imperialism’s opportunities, or else as a sentimental novel reinforcing domestic values: Kurtz’s Intended, who appears at the novella’s conclusion, was roundly praised by turn-of-the-century reviewers for her maturity and sentimental appeal. A classic.

Joseph Conrad's searing tale of one of the strangest and most memorable journeys ever taken. Quite simply the scariest book ever written, this is a searing tale of one of the strangest and most memorable journeys ever undertaken - to the heart of a geographical and psychological wilderness from which no-one returns unscarred. For this isn't simply a journey up an uncharted river into a geographical wilderness; rather, it's a trip deep into our collective subconscious.

River steamboat captain Charles Marlow has set forth on the Congo in Africa to find the enigmatic European trader Mr. Kurtz. Preceded by his reputation as a brilliant emissary of progress, Kurtz has now established himself as a god among the natives in "one of the darkest places on earth." Marlow suspects something else of Kurtz: he has gone mad.

A wonderful anthology of 15 of the great classic Novellas. 1. Immensee by Theodor Storm 2. The Jew's Beech Tree by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff 3. The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad 4. The Withered Arm by Thomas Hardy 5. Mad Monkton by Wilkie Collins 6. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson 7. The Lifted Veil by George Eliot 8. England my England by D. H. Lawrence

Born in 1857 in Poland, Joseph Conrad became a British citizen just before he turned 30. In the intervening years he lost both parents, becoming an orphan at 11, being thereafter raised by an uncle, who let the boy go to Marseille, where he began to work on merchant ships. At age 36 his life turned from one of ships to one of literary pursuit. Conrad brought to English literature both a fresh layer of style and a deeper examination of the human psyche in a wealth of works. In this audiobook we dwell among his numerous short stories.

When Jim, a young merchant seaman, joins a ship carrying Muslims to Mecca, he's flush with heroic daydreams. But after only a few days aboard, the Patna hits something in the night and begins to take on water. In a crucial moment that tests his courage, Jim cowers and abandons ship rather than risk his life to save the pilgrims. Tried for shameful dereliction of duty, the guilt-ridden Englishman sets forth to make amends for his past in the remote territory of Patusan.