Publisher: Project Gutenberg
Emma, by Jane Austen, is a novel about the perils of misconstrued romance. The novel was first published in December 1815. As in her other novels, Austen explores the concerns and difficulties of genteel women living in Georgian-Regency England; she also creates a lively 'comedy of manners' among her characters.
A language guide “exploring nearly 300 old and new expressions, proverbs and folk wisdom” from the author of Breaking Out of Beginner’s Spanish (The Eagle). One of the most challenging—and entertaining—aspects of learning another language is the idiom. Those quirky phrases, steeped in metaphor and colorful cultural references, enliven conversation and make your cross-cultural communication familiar, fun, and meaningful. ¡Dichos! (Sayings) brings us a vibrant compendium of both age-old and brand-new expressions from across Latin America, compiled by the language enthusiast whose Breaking Out of Beginner’s Spanish transformed thousands of readers’ interactions with the Spanish language. ¡Dichos! is divided into thematic sections covering topics ranging from games and relaxation to politics, macho men, and Mondays. Spanish speakers can also use the book to identify the spot-on/best slangy English equivalent for a Spanish-language idiom. Packed with gems like La barba me huele a tigre, y yo mismo me tengo miedo (My beard smells of tiger, and I’m even afraid of myself) and Para todo mal, mezcal; para todo bien, también (For everything bad, mezcal; for everything good, likewise), this book is the ultimate tool for taking your language skills to the next level as you navigate nuance with humor and linguistic agility.Show book
Hailed by Time as an “extravagantly comic” novel, A Woman Named Drown is a wild and strange journey through America’s South that follows a young PhD dropout who falls in with an amateur actress–cum-pool sharkOn the brink of earning his doctorate in chemistry, the unnamed narrator decides to chuck it all away in favor of real life. So begins an odd pilgrimage through the American South. In Tennessee, our hero is bewitched by an older, gin-swilling, pool-playing sometimes-actress who claims to have recently starred in a theatrical production about a “woman named Drown.” He moves in with her and just as quickly begins encountering her strange compatriots. Before he knows it, they’re heading farther south together—to Florida—where the data that the dropout scientist is collecting from life’s laboratory is about to get quite contradictory.Richly influenced by offbeat literary giant Donald Barthelme, Padgett Powell’s A Woman Named Drown offers readers a smorgasbord of literary strangeness—a surreal series of adventures in which nothing much—and yet everything—happens at once.Show book
Fossdyke Retirement Home has seen its fair share of quirky characters, but it’s never seen the likes of these four geriatric musicians who form a band called Fossils. Chaos erupts after winning a national competition, when a local DJ who entered their recording into the contest labels Fossils as a vibrant young rock band. Fearing the English press persecuting them and their families when they find out the truth, the four flee England until they can resolve their situation. Follow the madcap adventures of Britain’s most irreverently lovable elderly rockers as they trip, stumble, and fall into one situation after another while traveling around Southeast Asia evading adoring fans, journalists, and a ruthless record producer. Viagra, Snuff, and Rock ‘n’ RollShow book
This is not a poem. It's barely even a book. It's one page making fun of poems that aren't poems. And now it’s a 42-second audiobook too! Perfect for those long road trips and the busy individual with no time to sit down with a book.Show book
The bawdy and satirical eighteenth-century novel: “A comic tour de force whose humor, of observation and incident, explodes on to every page” (The Guardian, “The 100 Best Novels”). Written in 1759 and published in nine volumes, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman was a literary sensation. An experimental, fictional autobiography, it broke the traditional rules of chronological storytelling. Tristram tells his tale his own way, peppering in opinions and random anecdotes throughout the events of his life—starting from his almost interrupted conception. The novel features such memorable characters as Tristram’s parents, his tender uncle Toby, the “man-midwife” Dr. Slop, and pastor Yorick. “Tristram Shandy and its author, Laurence Sterne, are so intensely modern in mood and attitude, so profanely alert to the nuances of the human comedy, and so engaged with the narrative potentiality of the genre that it comes as something of a shock to discover that the novel was published during the seven years war.” —The Guardian, “The 100 Best Novels”Show book
This is a collection of stories collected over thousands of years by various authors, translators and scholars. They are an amalgam of mythology and folk tales from the Indian sub-continent, Persia, and Arabia. No original manuscript has ever been found, but several versions date the collection’s genesis to somewhere between AD 800-900. The stories are wound together under the device of a long series of cliff-hangers told by Shahrazad to her husband Shahryar, to prevent him from executing her. Many tales that have become independently famous come from the Book, among them Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and the voyages of Sinbad the Sailor. This collection comes from the first of sixteen volumes translated by Richard Francis Burton. (Summary based on Wikipedia article and LibriVox's The Book of A Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 01))Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Volume 4 and Volume 6Show book
