DescriptionHere are 60 of the finest and most entertaining poems for younger listeners. There are nonsense poems ("The Jumblies"), classic animal poems ("The Snail"), stories of adventure ("The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens") and Robert Browning's classic tale of adults getting their come-uppance ("The Pied Pipe of Hamelin"). Modern poetry also makes its contribution with wordplay ("Zoe's Ear-rings") and images of nature ("Weathers"). Though principally aimed at eight to thirteen year olds, this is a collection to delight listeners young and old alike.
DescriptionThe glorious but tragic story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table is one of the great legends of Western civilization. Storytellers and poets down the centuries have returned repeatedly to the universal themes of the Quest of the Holy Grail and the love between Sir Launcelot and Queen Guenever. Yet the first printed account, written by the 15th century knight Sir Thomas Malory, remains unmatched. In words which speak as directly to us today as they did to his own period, he brings to life a rich tale of heroism and ideals undermined by the poignancy of human emotions.
DescriptionPublished in 1916, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man follows the progress of Stephen Dedalus from infancy to early manhood. The richness of the language and Joyce's mastery of literary style as he describes the Dedalus family, young Stephen's education by the Jesuits, his sexual awakening, his intellectual development, and his eventual revolt against the religion in which he has been raised have ensured the novel's place as one of the masterpieces of 20th-century literature.
DescriptionJoseph Conrad's masterpiece, Nostromo, is a multilayered work about violent revolution and the moral destruction of a heroic man. Conrad convincingly invents an entire country, Costaguana, and sets it afire as men battle for power and a fortune in silver. No other work so perfectly creates characters at every level of society, from the English empire-builder Charles Gould to the handsome Italian sailor Nostromo, who, like the country, is about to be consumed by secret guilt and corruption. Ambitiously bringing to life an era of Latin American history, Nostromo seems as contemporary as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, as uncannily relevant today as when Conrad penned it in 1904.
DescriptionOriginally written for Dickens' weekly magazine, Household Words, this short novel follows the fate of Sissy Jupe, a warm-hearted circus child, and the family that adopts her. Deserted by her ailing father, Sissy is taken into the cold household of the Gradgrind family, which operates a school. The "eminently practical" Thomas Gradgrind believes only in facts and figures and has raised his children accordingly, thoroughly suppressing the imaginative side of their nature. They grow up in ignorance of love and affection, of beauty and culture, or of empathy for others, and the consequences are devastating. Only after numerous crises does Thomas realize that his principles have corrupted their lives. Dickens' satirical expose of the Industrial Revolution condemns the utilitarianism that exploited the bodies, minds, and souls of the vulnerable labor class.
DescriptionDick Heldar is a war correspondent and an artist, well known for the drawings he sends home to the London papers from wars in exotic places like Sudan. When he returns to London, he attempts to make a career for himself as a serious artist and re-encounters his childhood sweetheart, Maisie. He then learns that a minor problem with his eyes is actually the onset of an incurable blindness, the result of a head injury during the war. As his vision fails, the light of everything around him, his life, hopes, and dreams, fails with it. Terrible choices must be made between the love of a woman and the love of the men who stood by him at the front. Kipling won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907 in consideration of his power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas, and remarkable talent for narration.
DescriptionThis delightful tale of thwarted ambition and forbidden love follows the adventures and fortunes of an endearing young rogue, Frank Softly. Originally serialized in Household Words in 1859, Rogue is one of Collins's most richly comic creations. 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. Proffering his own take on picaresque storytelling - and with many a grain of truth for 20-somethings today - this is Wilkie Collins at his entertaining best.
DescriptionAnne Elliot made a big mistake: she let the love of her life get away. But seven years later, he comes back from the sea. As with all Jane Austen novels, this draws much of its appeal from the author's talent for observation and satire. The snobberies of a genteel world are exposed by its demurely mischievious heroine.
DescriptionThree tales from The Canterbury Tales, read in the original Middle English by Richard Bebb under the direction of Britain's foremost Chaucer scholar, Derek Brewer.
DescriptionIn Chancery, the second novel in John Galsworthy's epic social satire The Forsyte Saga, follows the events of A Man of Property . After suffering the death of her lover and abuse from her husband, Soames, Irene Forsyte finally leaves her marriage for good. Though socially disgraced by her affair, she forms a bond with the late Old Jolyon, a father of the Forsyte clan who had grown distant from the family after reconciling with one of his outcast sons. The young Jolyon had been disinherited after divorcing his wife to marry a penniless foreign governess. Now, with both his father and his beloved wife dead, the younger Jolyon finds himself drawn in sympathy to Irene, who was so dear to Old Jolyon in his final days. Their shared troubles blossom into a romance, to the horror of Soames Forsyte.
