Showing results by narrator "Susan McCarthy" in All Categories

After Jane Austen's earliest known writings, she began a more serious work, Lady Susan, in 1793 or 1794. It is a short, epistolary novel that portrays a woman bent on the exercise of her own powerful mind and personality to the point of social self-destruction.

Drawing upon everyday incidents, common situations, and rural imagery, Robert Frost fashioned poetry of great lyrical beauty and potent symbolism. His language is simple, clear, and colloquial, yet dense with meaning and wider significance. This brilliant collection features some of Frost's greatest works, including "The Road Not Taken," "Asking for Roses," "The Death of the Hired Man," "In the Home Stretch," "Into My Own," "Meeting and Passing," "Mending Wall," and more.

The story opens in the country parsonage of Dr. Primrose, a kindly man who has a good heart, a good family, and a good income. Suddenly, his idyllic life is cruelly devastated by a series of misfortunes, and he ends up in prison. Yet, despite all this calamity and injustice, the vicar never loses sight of Christian morality, a conviction which lends him genuine nobility and, in the end, also brings justice and the restoration of his family and fortune.

The Peterkin Papers record the antics of the most memorably and hopelessly bumbling of respectable American families. Confronted by the endless challenges of daily life, the Peterkins rise to every occasion with misguided aplomb: they sit out in the sun for hours and fail to go for a ride because they've forgotten to unhitch the horse.

Known as a "poet of the people," Carl Sandburg wrote verses infused with soulfulness and lyric grace, and his work was characterized with a love and compassion for the common man. Here is a collection of nearly 100 of his best poems, including "Chicago," "Fog," "To a Contemporary Bunkshooter," "Masses," and "The Great Hunt," as well as other verses featuring themes like love, war, death, loneliness, immigrant life, and the beauty of nature.

When a dragon is discovered up on the Downs, the Boy is not in the least surprised. He's always known the cave there was a dragon cave, so it seems only right for a dragon to be living in it. The Boy decides to pay a visit to the cave, and he thinks he knows just what to expect. But this particular dragon is not a bit like the ones in fairy tales!

What we've suspected is true. They're everywhere around us. Angels, that is, as nine of this generations boldest and most acclaimed fantasy writers tell us in this brilliant collection. At once highly imaginative and intensely spiritual, these stories are performed by top stars of television, film and music, who have themselves explored various areas of paranormal. It's a feast that will leave you infinitively more hopeful and a little less alone.

A Golden Deed must be something more than mere display of fearlessness. Grave and resolute fulfilment of duty is required to give it the true weight. For the true metal of a Golden Deed is self-devotion. Selfishness is the dross and alloy that gives the unsound ring to many an act that has been called glorious. And, on the other hand, it is not only the valor, which meets a thousand enemies upon the battlefield, or scales the walls in a forlorn hope, that is of true gold....

Two stories from the master of the surprise ending: In "Elsie in New York", Elsie is an innocent young woman who, upon the death of her father, must look for work to make a living. In "The Purple Dress", two young women clerks have been saving money all year to buy new dresses for an annual gala.

Anne is adopted by the Cuthberts even after a great mistake at the orphanage. But the frail red-headed young girl stays, even though not wanted at first. She is raised strictly but lovingly by the Cuthberts whose world is set upside down by her wonderful, creative and sometime crazy and eccentric ways. In the end, she gives them endless joy as she grows into womanhood.