Publisher: Krill Press
William Peter McGivern was an American novelist and television scriptwriter. He published more than 20 novels, mostly mysteries and crime thrillers, some under the pseudonym Bill Peters.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a high court judge who has never given the certainty of his dying much of a thought. But one day, death comes to him in the shape of abrupt illness, and to his shocked agony and surprise, he is now forced to deal with his own mortality. This novella by Tolstoy plunges us into the gloom of death but also raises us up into the light of life and spiritual transcendence: "He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. 'Where is it? What death?' There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light."Show book
When two friends reunite after a twenty-year absence, the limits of friendship become evident. Painting two distinct portraits of people who have grown apart, O. Henry explores themes of friendship, loyalty and trust. ¶ In Mammon and the Archer, the pursuit of love, and the love of money go head-to-head for dominance in a timely engagement. Famous for his unexpected plot twists, O. Henry was not only a master at the craft of writing the short story, but explored deep themes that still resonate today.Show book
The Blockade Runners is a story by Jules Verne. The American Civil War plot centers on the exploits of a British merchant captain named James Playfair who must break the Union blockade of Charleston harbor in South Carolina to trade supplies for cotton and, later in the book, to rescue Halliburtt, the abolitionist journalist father of a young girl held prisoner (the father, not the girl) by the Confederates. Verne's tale was inspired by reality as many ships were actually lost while acting as blockade runners in and around Charleston in the early 1860s.Show book
"A Story of the Days To Come" is a novella by H. G. Wells comprising five chapters that was first published in the June to October 1899 issues of The Pall Mall Magazine. It was later included in an 1899 collection of Wells's short stories, Tales of Space and Time. The novella depicts two lovers in a dystopian future London of the 22nd century and explores the implications of excessive urbanisation, class warfare, and advances in the technology of medicine, communication, transportation, and agriculture. Like When the Sleeper Wakes, published in the same year, the novella extrapolates the trends Wells observed in 19th-century Victorian London two hundred years into the future. The London of the early 22nd century has a population of over 30 million, with the lower classes living in subterranean dwellings, and the middle and upper classes living in skyscrapers and largely communal accommodations. Moving walkways interconnect the city, with fast air-travel and superhighways available between cities. The countryside is largely abandoned.Show book
A romantic and a dreamer, Alexei Tolstoy never quite came to terms with the conflict between the glorious notion of a revolution to bring equality and justice to the world and its real-life execution, which took place in Russia in 1917. While he realized struggle was inevitable, the full horror of hunger, epidemics, and civil wars never truly sunk in until he found himself in the midst of them. Even worse was the life, which followed, filled with mundane minutia, bureaucracy, corruption, and small-mindedness. To his great shock and disappointment, Tolstoy discovered equality and brotherhood were not always bestowed on the worthiest of men. Blue Cities - the story of a young architect, whose inability to fit in with this strange, altered world eventually leads to a crime - is a literary record of Tolstoy's own thoughts and feelings during that harrowing and confusing time.Show book
The Devil is a novella by Leo Tolstoy, was published in 1911, after the write’s death. It tells the story of a married landowner slowly overcome with unrelenting sexual desire for one of the peasants on his estate. Before his marriage, he had many sexual relationships with women while living in St. Petersburg. He inherited an estate in the country after the death of his father and he decided to leave the city. In his new life, he lives with his mother. She thinks it is time for him to get married. But after a year of marriage, he finds himself in a position where he needs to have his lust satisfied again.Leo Tolstoy explored the tortures of lust in several of his story which is written in the last years of his life. In these later works - like The Devil, Father Sergius and The Kreutzer Sonata - he portrays sexual desire as one of the bodily temptations that must be renounced in order to find the divinity within.This version of the book is translated by Soroosh Habibi to Persian (Farsi) and narrated by Hamed Faal. The Persian version of The Devil’s audiobook is published by Maktub worldwide.Show book
