Publisher: anamsaleem
In this uproarious satire from Jacobean playwright Ben Jonson, the clever Venetian gentleman Volpone hatches an outrageous scheme to dupe a greedy trio of hangers-on who are after his fortune. A ragtag cast of characters, including a dwarf, a eunuch, and a hermaphrodite, get caught up in the plot along the way.
The tragedy of King Lear receives an outstanding performance in an all-star cast led by Britain’s senior classical actor, Paul Scofield. He is joined by Alec McCowen as Gloucester, Kenneth Branagh as The Fool, Harriet Walter as Gonerill, Sara Kestelman as Regan and Emilia Fox as Cordelia. This is the ninth recording of Shakespeare plays undertaken by Naxos AudioBooks in conjunction with Cambridge University Press, and is directed by John Tydeman. It was released to mark the eightieth birthday of Paul Scofield in January 2002.Show book
Ambrose Bierce's collection of short stories of the supernatural and the macabre Can Such Things Be was first published in 1893. One of it's most frightening tales The Damned Thing tells of the horrifying slaughter of a man by a supernatural and invisible “Thing”!Public Domain (P)2016 Spiders' House Audio/Roy MacreadyShow book
Mary Rackham was born in Norwich on 14th August 1848 to a merchant family. Little is known of her early life and her biography only re-appears in September 1871 with marriage to Fairman Joseph Mann, a farmer with 800 acres. Mary moved to Shropham, Norfolk and became involved with the workhouse, visiting the sick and other unfortunates of the parish, her observations and experiences a valuable source for her later stories. She took up writing, partly to offset the dreary village life of her surroundings, in the 1880s and published her first novel, ‘The Parish of Hilby’ (1883) at her own expense. It was well received by the critics. Thus began a career that spanning three decades provided thirty-three novels, hundreds of short stories, and fourteen plays. Her work was largely focused on rural life in Norfolk and centered on the fictional town of Dulditch, with grim but authentic accounts of poverty and deprivation. Her marriage produced one boy and three girls. With her husband's death in 1913, she moved to Sheringham. She is regarded as a major contributor to East Anglian literature with particular praise given to her short stories. Mary E Mann died on 19th May 1929. She was 80. Her grave-marker is a carved open book with the epitaph ‘We bring our years to an end, as if it were a tale that is told’. Life in ‘Ben Pitcher's Elly’ is degrading, awful and unvarnished. The chances of this young girl having a happy life are remote but her story must be heard.Show book
"The Picture of Dorian Gray", Oscar Wilde's only novel, was first published on both sides of the Atlantic by the American periodical Lippincott's Monthly Review on 20th June 1890. Not only did this text provoke a heated debate in the British press in the same year, it also became notorious for its being quoted and examined in court in Wilde's three trials in the spring of 1895. As a story, the novel shows how a young man in a Faustian situation wishes for his portrait to age rather than himself. Steeped in sin, which, however, is alluded to rather than spelt out, "Dorian Gray" for Wilde's critics and enemies became an image of the author's own behaviour. - Going back to the typescript of the novel, the editor has restored passages to the text that had been excised or censored by Wilde himself and the editorial committee in America. Danny Morrison has provided a preface placing Wilde in the Irish political context of his own day and beyond.Show book
Nahum is angry and sees visions were the city of Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, is destroyed and the Assyrian inhabitants are murdered or sold off as slaves.Show book
Mr. Brisher's Treasure is a short story by H. G. Wells. Herbert George "H. G." Wells (21 September 1866 - 13 August 1946) was an English writer, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing textbooks and rules for war games. Wells is sometimes called "The Father of Science Fiction," as are Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback. His most notable science fiction works include The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau. Wells's earliest specialised training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context. He was also from an early date an outspoken socialist, often (but not always, as at the beginning of the First World War) sympathising with pacifist views. His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he sometimes indicated on official documents that his profession was that of "Journalist." Most of his later novels were not science fiction. Some described lower-middle class life (Kipps; The History of Mr Polly), leading him to be touted as a worthy successor to Charles Dickens, but Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted, in Tono-Bungay (1909), a diagnosis of English society as a whole. Wells's first non-fiction bestseller was Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought (1901). When originally serialised in a magazine it was subtitled, "An Experiment in Prophecy,"Show book
