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  The Facts In The Case of M Valdemar

  Edgar Allan Poe

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  The narrator presents the facts of the extraordinary case of Valdemar, which have incited public discussion. He is interested in mesmerism, a pseudoscience involving bringing a patient into a hypnagogic state by the influence of magnetism, a process that later developed into hypnotism. He points out that, as far as he knows, no one has ever been mesmerized at the point of death, and he is curious to see what effects mesmerism would have on a dying person. He considers experimenting on his friend Ernest Valdemar, an author whom he had previously mesmerized, and who has recently been diagnosed with phthisis (tuberculosis).

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  To the Lighthouse

  Virginia Woolf

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  The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflict between men and women. 
    
  As time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and simultaneously, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph—the human capacity for change.

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  The Story Of Shakespeare's...

  William Shakespeare, Mary Ellen...

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  Cymbeline is listed as one of Shakespeare’s tragedies although some think it to be one of his romances as it explores the familiar themes of jealousy, adultery, innocence and vengeance.   Cymbeline is the King of Britain who twenty years prior to the play’s setting wrongly banishes one of his Lords, Belarius, who in turn kidnaps the King’s sons to prevent him having heirs to his throne.  The King also banishes one of his subjects, Posthumous, for secretly marrying his daughter Imogen and the Roman army descend on Britain although by the end of the play there is peace, with these strands happily resolved ably aided by Ghizela Rowe’s reading.  This narrative version was written by Mary & Charles Lamb.

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  Much Ado About Nothing

  William Shakespeare

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  Much Ado About Nothing is generally considered one of Shakespeare's best comedies, because it combines elements of robust hilarity with more serious meditations on honor, shame, and court politics.The play includes two quite different stories of romantic love. Hero and Claudio fall in love almost at first sight, but an outsider, Don John, strikes out at their happiness. Beatrice and Benedick are kept apart by pride and mutual antagonism until others decide to play Cupid.

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  Heart of Darkness

  Joseph Conrad

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  Horror awaits Charlie Marlow, a seaman assigned by an ivory company to retrieve a cargo boat along with one of its employees, Mr. Kurtz, who is stranded deep in the heart of the Belgian Congo. Marlow's journey up the brooding dark river soon becomes a struggle to maintain his own sanity as he witnesses the brutalization of the natives by white traders and then discovers the enigmatic Mr. Kurtz. Kurtz, once a genius and the company's most successful representative, has become a savage; his compound is decorated by a row of human heads mounted on spears. It soon becomes clear that the demonic mastermind, liberated from the conventions of European culture, has traded his soul to become ruler of his own horrific dominion.Acclaimed to be one of the great, albeit disturbing, visionary works of western civilization, Joseph Conrad's haunting tale dramatizes the stark realities of Africa in the colonial period. Heart of Darkness reflects the physical and psychological tragedies that Conrad had experienced while working in the Belgian Congo in 1890. It is also the basis of Francis Ford Coppola's Academy Award-winning film Apocalypse Now.

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  Dracula

  Bram Stoker

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  This spectacular and haunting version of Bram Stoker's Dracula stars Orson Welles and was performed in 1938. Between 1879 and 1889 Bram Stoker was business manager for the world-famous Lyceum Theatre in London, where he supplemented his income by writing a large number of sensational novels. This, perhaps his most famous tale about the vampire Dracula was published in 1897.

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