Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Classics

Smooth Stones Taken from Ancient Brooks is a collection of sentences and quaint sayings from this renowned Puritan. Gathered by Spurgeon from the six-volume set of Brooks' Works, it remains an excellent introduction to both the man and his writing.

Gretel - yes, that Gretel - is now 35, very large, still living with her brother, Hans, and working as a private investigator. The small, sleepy town of Gesternstadt is shaken to its pretty foundations when the workshop of the local cart maker is burned to the ground, and a body is discovered in the ashes. It is Gretel who notices that the cadaver is missing a finger. At first she does not see this as significant, as her mind is fully focused on a new case.

Though known for his classic novels of adventure and coming of age, Mark Twain is equally esteemed for his short stories, which abound with the colorful characters and often comic antics readers have come to expect from his longer works. Included here is "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," a wild yarn involving a case of mistaken identity, a gambler who'd bet on anything, and an unusual frog named Daniel Webster.

John Griffith "Jack" London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. This collection includes "Love of Life", "A Day's Lodging", "The White Man's Way", "The Story of Keesh", "The Unexpected", "Brown Wolf", "The Sun-Dog Trail", and "Negore, the Coward".

Now, for the first time in audio, Blackstone presents seven great plays in one volume: Euripides' Medea, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Moliere's The Imaginary Invalid, Dumas' Camille, Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, Shaw's Arms and the Man, and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. These productions illustrate the development of European drama from ancient times to the threshold of the modern theater.

John Carter, Prince of Helium, has been imprisoned for a Martian year, his wife in another cell - alive or dead, he doesn't know. In this continuation of the saga of the amazing world of Barsoom, the love story of Carter and Dejah Thoris - the red-skinned, oviparous princess - unfolds. Like all the tales in the series, fantasy and adventure combine in a style as malleable as dreams, exotic and dangerous and unending.

Left by harrowing circumstances to fend for herself in the great capital of a foreign country, Lucy Snowe, the narrator and heroine of Villette, achieves by degrees her independence from both outer necessity and inward grief. Lucy flees from an unhappy past in England to begin a new life as a teacher at a French boarding school in the cosmopolitan capital of Villette.

A challenge to the moral climate of the day, The Reef follows the fancies of George Darrow, a young diplomat en route from London to France, intent on proposing to the widowed Anna Leath. Unsettled by Anna's reticence, Darrow drifts into an affair with Sophy Viner, a charmingly naive and impecunious young woman whose relations with Darrow and Anna's family threaten his prospects for success.

David Copperfield is the timeless tale of a thoughtful orphan discovering how to live and love in a cutthroat, indifferent adult world. It firmly embraces all the eternal freshness, the comic delights, the tender warmth, and the ghastly horrors of childhood.

This is the story of Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, a government clerk who believes that a fellow clerk has taken over his identity and is determined to bring about his ruin. Considered the most Gogolesque of Dostoevsky's works, the novella brilliantly depicts Golyadkin's descent into madness in a way that is hauntingly poetic. The Double illustrates Dostoevsky's uncanny ability at capturing the complexity of human emotion, especially the darker side of the human psyche.

The Red and the Black is a powerful character study of Julien Sorel, a clever and idealistic young opportunist who attempts to rise above his station through a combination of talent, deception, and hypocrisy. He uses his powers of seduction and charm to secure advancement, only to find himself betrayed by his own passions and outwitted by the larger political and social intrigues of post-Napoleonic France.

Widely considered one of Isaac Bashevis Singer's most notable works of short fiction, "Gimpel the Fool" was originally written in Yiddish. It was later translated into English by Saul Bellow and appeared inthe 1953 edition of Partisan Review. The story, a parable, tells of a foolish, unlucky baker named Gimpel, who isconstantly tricked and heckled by other villagers. His follies ultimately reveal a moral lesson.

Set in Florence in 1492, a time of great political and religious turmoil, Eliot's novel blends vivid fictional characters with historical figures such as Savonarola, Machiavelli, and the Medicis. When Romola, the virtuous daughter of a blind scholar, marries Tito Melema, a charismatic young Greek, she is bound to a man whose escalating betrayals threaten to destroy all that she holds dear.

When this groundbreaking serialized dramatization premiered on 320 U.S. radio stations, critics were unanimous in their praise. It won numerous honors including the George Foster Peabody Award and the Pulitzer Prize for broadcasting. Never before or since has such an ambitious undertaking been attempted in public radio, and it was accomplished, not by a major network, but by a small nonprofit independent producer in Chicago. That was in 1981. It has been sitting on the shelf ever since.

In Stephen Mitchell's The Iliad, the epic story resounds again across 2,700 years, as if the lifeblood of its heroes Achilles and Patroclus, Hector, and Priam flows in every word. And we are there with them, amid the horror and ecstasy of war, carried along by a poetry that lifts even the most devastating human events into the realm of the beautiful. Mitchell's The Iliad is the first translation based on the work of the preeminent Homeric scholar Martin L. West.

Mortal Coils is a collection of five pieces written by Aldous Huxley in the 1920s. The first one, "The Giaconda Smile", is a short murder story. "Permutations Among the Nightingales" is a play concerning amorous problems experienced by the patrons of a certain establishment. "The Tillotson Banquet" tells of an old artist who was thought to be dead. "Green Tunnels" is about the boredom of a young girl on holiday with her family. "Nuns at Luncheon" is a story told by a nun falling in love.

Silas Marner is a gentle linen weaver who is framed for a heinous theft by his best friend. Exiled from the sphere of human trust and love, he becomes a recluse, caring only for the gold he receives for his work. But when an abandoned child mysteriously appears at his cottage one New Year's Eve, Silas discovers an unselfish love that will ultimately lead to his redemption.

Propelled into society by his ever-hopeful father, Frank is introduced to a variety of professions in order to make his fortune. Not industrious by nature, however, Frank finds working life a challenge, and by his 25th birthday, he has failed medicine, portrait-painting, caricaturing, and even forgery. Disenchanted with life, he despairs of ever finding something to commit to — until he meets Alicia Dulcifer and her inexplicably wealthy father.

George Eliot's The Lifted Veil was first published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1859 and has now become one of the author's most widely read and critically discussed stories. Told from the point of view of a young, egocentric, and morbid clairvoyant man, Latimer, it is a dark fantasy portrait of an artist whose visionary powers merely blight his life. The story reflected the scientific interest of the time in the physiology of the brain, mesmerism, phrenology, and experiments in revivification.

O. Henry wove several stories together into this highly episodic narrative, taking his title and inspiration from Lewis Carroll's ballad of the walrus and the carpenter in Through the Looking-Glass. The stories are set in the fictional country of Anchuria in Central America, a banana republic where larceny is rampant and revolution lurking in every impoverished back alley. O. Henry offers a cutting satire of contemporary politics and prejudices.