Stories of King Arthur and His Knights. Retold from Malory’s “Morte dArthur”.

A treasure trove of more than two hundred poems, this gem of an anthology compiled by Mary E Burt is indeed a most valuable set of poems to read or listen to. Published in 1904, Poems Every Child Should Know contains some well-loved verses like Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Lewis Carroll's delightful parody Father William, Felicia Hemans' deeply-moving Casablanca and other favorites. It also has lesser-known but equally beautiful pieces like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Arrow and The Song, Robert Browning's The Incident of the French Camp, Eugene Field's nonsense lyrics Wynken, Blynken and Nod and a host of other wonderful verses...

Beowulf is a long narrative poem composed in Old English some time in between the 8th and 11th century AD. The only surviving manuscript that contains the poem is preserved in the British Library and it too was badly damaged by fire in 1731. It is considered to be the oldest surviving work of poetry in English and one of the rare pieces of vernacular European literature that has survived since Medieval times. A prince arrives to rid a neighboring country of a terrible monster. He mortally wounds the horrendous creature and it retreats to die in its lair in the remote mountains...

An entertaining selection of “modern” ghost stories selected “to include specimens of a few of the distinctive types of modern ghosts, as well as to show the art of individual stories.”Sure to please the love of the supernatural in all of us!

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th Century Middle English alliterative romance outlining an adventure of Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur’s Round Table. In the tale, Sir Gawain accepts a challenge from a mysterious warrior who is completely green, from his clothes and hair to his beard and skin. The “Green Knight” offers to allow anyone to strike him with his axe if the challenger will take a return blow in a year and a day. Gawain accepts, and beheads him in one blow, only to have the Green Knight stand up, pick up his head, and remind Gawain to meet him at the appointed time...

Collection of various works which James Joyce quotes and references to in his epic novel Ulysses, and provides them in audio form. Perfect for Joyce scholars, fans, and aficionados!

The Somonyng of Everyman (The Summoning of Everyman), usually referred to simply as Everyman, is a late 15th-century English morality play. Like John Bunyan's novel Pilgrim's Progress, Everyman examines the question of Christian salvation by use of allegorical characters, and what Man must do to attain it. The premise is that the good and evil deeds of one's life will be tallied by God after death, as in a ledger book. The play is the allegorical accounting of the life of Everyman, who represents all mankind...

Sample a moment of magic realism from the Red Book of Hergest: On one side of the river he saw a flock of white sheep, and on the other a flock of black sheep. And whenever one of the white sheep bleated, one of the black sheep would cross over, and become white; and when one of the black sheep bleated, one of the white sheep would cross over, and become black. Before passing on to the Mabinogion proper, Lady Charlotte Guest devotes Volume I of her compilation of medieval Welsh tales to three brief romances of Arthur’s Court...

The Lords of the Housetops reveals the cat through the creative lenses of 13 authors. Consequently, this carefully chosen collection of stories is as complex, charismatic and clever as a cat.

“Who can help laughing when an ordinary journalist seriously proposes to limit the subject-matter at the disposal of the artist?” “We are dominated by journalism…. Journalism governs for ever and ever.” One of the nastiest of the British tabloids was founded a year too late to join in the moral panic generated to accompany Oscar Wilde’s court appearances in 1895. Yet there was no shortage of hypocritical journalists posing as moral arbiters to the nation, then as now. This compendium...

A collection of classic mystery and detective stories, collected and edited by Julian Hawthorne. Note: the second chapter of Dickens’ The Haunted House is not included in this edition.

Some day an enterprising editor may find time to glean from the whole field of Canadian literature a representative collection of wit and humour. . . . The present little collection obviously makes no such ambitious claim. It embraces, however, what are believed to be representative examples of the work of some of our better-known writers, many of which will no doubt be quite familiar to Canadian readers, but perhaps none the less welcome on that account.

Reginald in Russia is the title story in a collection of fifteen witty and satirical stories, sketches and one "playlet" by that master of the short story H. H. Munro, better Known as Saki. The stories are: Reginald in Russia -- The Reticence of Lady Anne -- The Lost Sanjak -- The Sex That Doesn't Shop -- The Blood-feud of Toad-Water -- A Young Turkish Catastrophe -- Judkin of the Parcels -- Gabriel-Ernest -- The Saint and the Goblin -- The Soul of Laploshka -- The Bag -- The Strategist -- Cross Currents -- The Baker's Dozen (A Playlet) -- The Mouse.

Originally crafted as a scathing expose of the Chicago meatpacking industry of the early twentieth century, The Jungle by American journalist and author, Upton Sinclair, was based on his investigative work into the dark underbelly of capitalism in the country. Throughout his entire career, he wrote passionately about the inhuman conditions that lay behind the glittering facade of free market economics. Jurgis Rudkus is a Lithuanian immigrant. The novel opens on his wedding day to the lovely young Ona Lukoszaite...

King Coal is a book by Upton Sinclair, first published in 1917, that exposes the dirty working conditions in the coal mining industry in the western United States during the 1910s. As in an earlier work, The Jungle, Sinclair expresses his socialist viewpoints from the perspective of a single protagonist, Hal Warner, caught up in the schemes and plots of the oppressive American capitalist system. The book itself is based on the 1914-1915 Colorado coal strikes.Reader’s note: In Book 4, there is no chapter numbered Section 16 in the public domain Gutenberg e-text. However, no actual text from the book appears to be missing.

Upton Sinclair, born in 1878 was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author. He wrote over 90 books in many genres. Best known for his muckraking novel, The Jungle, Sinclair also wrote adventure fiction. Many of these works were written under the pseudonym, Ensign Clark Fitch, U.S.N. A Prisoner of Morrow, published in 1898 when Sinclair was but 20 years old, is one of these efforts. The period for this work is the ten-week Spanish–American War which occurred in 1898. Revolts against Spanish rule had been prevalent for decades in Cuba and were closely watched by Americans...

A story of white collar crime and intrigue told from the point of view of Montague, a member of the privileged class of New York. Montague witnesses the manipulation and upset of the stock market by high financier Dan Waterman who is motivated by revenge. Waterman's character is loosely based on J.P. Morgan.

Upton Sinclair is best known for his novel The Jungle, an expose of the meatpacking industry. He was also a playwright whose works for the stage reflected the same progressive viewpoints found in his other writing. In The Machine, published as part of Sinclair's 1912 collection Plays of Protest, Socialist activists show a rich man's daughter the truth about the society in which she has been raised.

"100%:The Story of a Patriot" dramatically recounts the adventures of a poor uneducated young man who lives by his wits and guile, as he becomes politicized during his involvement in the sometimes violent struggle between American “patriots” and “Reds”. The author wrote in the Appendix, which is not included in this recording: "Everything that has social significance is truth.... Practically all the characters in "100%" are real persons." This exciting, polemical novel was published in 1920...

The Mastersons, a wealthy Bostonian family, await the arrival of their cousin Anna in the wake of her grandfather's death. Though born in Boston, Anna, who prefers the name Oceana, spent most of her life on a tropical island in the Pacific with her father. A free spirit, her practices and values surrounding proper dress, romance, and entertainment clash with those of her conservative relatives. What will happen as patience and tolerance wear thin for both parties when alluring Oceana catches the...

The Congo is one of the best-known poems by American poet Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931). It was revolutionary in its use of sounds and rhythms — as sounds and rhythms — and includes elaborate annotations to guide its spoken performance. Lindsay categorized The Congo as “higher Vaudeville” and was famous for his exuberant performances of it. The poem’s imagery is racist, but Lindsay was a product of his time — born 14 years after the end of the American Civil War in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown, he revered Lincoln and viewed himself as a friend and supporter of African-American culture.

"This 1922 book by poet and sometime cultural critic Vachel Lindsay might have been the first to treat the then-new medium of moving pictures as an art form, one that was potentially as rich, complex, mysterious as far older ones, and whose physical and aesthetic properties were only starting to be understood. The highlight of the book might be “The Motion Picture of Fairy Splendor,” which examines the relationship between film storytelling, magic, myths, legends and bedtime stories. It’s discombobulating, in a good way, to read Lindsay’s attempts to grapple with what, precisely, cinema is...

This is a collection of poems on various topics by Vachel Lindsay. Please note that the Booker T. Washington trilogy had to be omitted from this collection.

All of us have our own favorite parts of a book which we love to read and re-read. The nicest part of this is that each time you read, you find something new to savor and remember. For those of us who haven't read some of the classics, a teaser in the form of a single chapter would probably be intriguing enough to want us to take up the book and start reading. Favorite Chapters Collection 001 is one such delicious tasting table! Ten chapters from some of the best known classics in English are available here and they're sure to delight not only those who have read the entire book but also those who are yet to do so...

Legend Land is a collection of some of the OLD TALES told in those Western Parts of Britain served by the GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY, now retold by LYONESSE

An anthology of Buddhist scriptures, appropriate as an introduction to its vast literature, or as a sampler for those who want to better understand Buddhism. The selections in this anthology are primarily from the Theravada school of Buddhism.

“Brazilian Tales” is a collection of six short stories selected by Isaac Goldberg as best representative of the Brazilian Literature of his period – the end of the 19th century. His comprehensive preface aims at familiarizing the reader with a literature that was – and still is – virtually unknown outside the boundaries of its own land, and the pieces chosen by Goldberg to be translated belong to writers that reached popularity and appreciation while still alive. This “pioneer volume”, as the translator himself puts it, still keeps its charm and interest as a way of offering to the English speaking public some “sample cases” of Brazilian Literature.

The Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, is a work of enormous proportions. Setting out with the simple goal of offering "American households a mass of good reading", the editors drew from literature of all times and all kinds what they considered the best pieces of human writing, and compiled an ambitious collection of 45 volumes (with a 46th being an index-guide). Besides the selection and translation of a huge number of poems, letters, short stories and sections of books, the collection offers, before each chapter, a short essay about the author or subject in question...

This is not a children’s book, as may be supposed from the title, but a collection of essays first published in The Idler magazine, in which over twenty well-known writers describe with characteristic style and humour their experiences in producing their first book… and getting it published. The book is profusely illustrated, not only with portraits of the authors, but also with scenes and illustrations from the books discussed. Authors include Jerome K. Jerome, R. L. Stevenson, Bret Harte, Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Mary Braddon...

Charles W. Eliot, 21st President of Harvard University, edited this volume of prefaces ... authored by a Who's Who of World Literature: Bacon, Calvin, Caxton, Condell, Copernicus, Dryden, Fielding, Goethe, Heminge, Hugo, Johnson, Knox, Newton, Raleigh, Spenser, Taine, Whitman and Wordsworth. Eliot wrote in his preface to these prefaces, "No part of a book is so intimate as the Preface. Here, after the long labor of the work is over, the author descends from his platform, and speaks with his reader as man to man, disclosing his hopes and fears, seeking sympathy for his difficulties, offering defence or defiance, according to his temper, against the criticisms which he anticipates."

At a certain committee meeting held in the spring of 1916, it was agreed that fourteen leading American authors, known to be extremely generous as well as gifted, should be asked to write a composite novel....Third, to have the novel finished and published serially during the autumn Campaign of 1917.The carrying out of these requirements has not been the childish diversion it may have seemed. Splendid team work, however, has made success possible.Every author represented, every worker on the team, has gratuitously contributed his or her services; and every dollar realized by the serial and book publication of "The Sturdy Oak" will be devoted to the Suffrage Cause...

The Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, is a work of enormous proportions. Setting out with the simple goal of offering "American households a mass of good reading", the editors drew from literature of all times and all kinds what they considered the best pieces of human writing, and compiled an ambitious collection of 45 volumes . Besides the selection and translation of a huge number of poems, letters, short stories and sections of books, the collection offers, before each chapter, a short essay about the author or subject in question...

Recitation was a vital part of the curriculum in education in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. It not only enabled students to gain practice in addressing groups in public, but also provided models for the study of accent and elocution – vital skills in the days before public address systems were universally available. Accordingly, a number of “reciters,” or collections of texts suitable for recitation, were published in this period. The Coo-ee Reciter, published in 1904, was one of the most popular of these collections in Australia...

The Blue Review was a short lived monthly journal published in London between May and July 1913. The successor to Rhythm, The Blue Review was edited by John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, but survived only three issues. In addition to poetry and short literary pieces, the review included reviews of theatre, music and the arts and of books recently published in English and French. The first issue of the journal includes the D. H. Lawrence short story, The Soiled Rose, which was later published as Shades of Spring. - Summary by Phil Benson

The Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, is a work of enormous proportions. Setting out with the simple goal of offering "American households a mass of good reading", the editors drew from literature of all times and all kinds what they considered the best pieces of human writing, and compiled an ambitious collection of 45 volumes . Besides the selection and translation of a huge number of poems, letters, short stories and sections of books, the collection offers, before each chapter, a short essay about the author or subject in question...

The Blue Review was a short lived monthly journal published in London between May and July 1913. The successor to Rhythm, The Blue Review was edited by John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, but survived only three issues. In addition to poetry and short literary pieces, the review included reviews of theatre, music and the arts and of books recently published in English and French. The second issue of the journal included two short stories by Katherine Mansfield. - Summary by Phil Benson

The Blue Review was a short lived monthly journal published in London between May and July 1913. The successor to Rhythm, The Blue Review was edited by John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, but survived only three issues. In addition to poetry and short literary pieces, the review included reviews of theatre, music and the arts and of books recently published in English and French. The third and final issue of the journal included Poetry by Rupert Brooke, short stories by Katherine Mansfield and Gilbert Cannan and a review of Thomas Mann's 'Death in Venice' by D. H. Lawrence. - Summary by Phil Benson

A collection of prose, poetry, jokes, special orders, et cetera written by the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps combatants of the Gallipoli Campaign . - Summary by KevinS

This is a collection of broadsides from London. Broadsides are short, popular publications, a precursor to today's tabloid journalism. The collection contains sensationalist and sometimes comical stories about criminal conduct, love, the Royal Family, politics, as well as gallows' literature. Gallow's literature were often sold at the execution. As a collection these broadsides are a reminder of how important the printer was at this time -- it is surely no coincidence that the printers are printed at the end of every broadside, while the authors remain anonymous. - Summary by kathrinee

A disparate assemblage of lingual mastery spanning genres and prowess with an eye toward style in favor of capitulation. Tocsin was translated by W. H. Lowe Maldoror was translated by John Rodker Gridale was translated by F. S. Flint .

On the occasion of Walt Whitman's 70th Birthday a "Committee of Citizens" in Camden, NJ held a special commemoration in his honor. This slim collection includes a autobiographical note by Whitman and his response to those present as well as a full record of the the speeches and appreciations offered, along with the letters and telegrams that poured in from all over the world. Contributors include: Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Ernest Rhys, Horace Traubel, Hallam Tennyson, William Rossetti, Gabriel Sarazin, William Morris, Rudolf Schmidt, William Sloane Kennedy, John G Whittier, John Addington Symonds, and many more. - Summary by Ed Humpal

A Phantom Lover is a supernatural novella by Vernon Lee (pseudonym of Violet Paget) first published in 1886. Set in a Kentish manor house, the story concerns a portrait painter commissioned by a squire, William Oke, to produce portraits of him and his wife, the eccentric Mrs. Alice Oke, who bears a striking resemblance to a woman in a mysterious, seventeenth century painting.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, by Vicente Blasco Ibañez and translated into English by Charlotte Brewster Jordan, depicts two branches of a family with its roots in the pampas of Argentina. The wealthy Argentinian, Julio Madariaga, comes from Spain and raises himself from poverty, becoming a self-made, wealthy cattleman. He is a man of extremes; an honest man with a rascally knack for taking advantage of others; a self-made man with overweening pride, prejudices, and a sharp, flinty temper that can spark into violence, he is at the same time given to great generosity toward those who are under him...

Tom Swift is approached by Mr. Preston, the owner of a circus, and begins to tell the story of Jake Poddington, Mr. Preston's most skilled hunter. As it turns out, Jake went missing just after sending word to Preston that Jake was on the trail of a tribe of giants, somewhere in South Africa. That was the last Preston has heard of Jake Poddington. Preston would like Tom to use one of his airships to search for Poddington, and if possible, bring back a giant for the circus.Listeners are forewarned that some elements and characters included in Tom Swift books portray certain ethnic groups in a very dated manner that modern readers, and listeners, may find offensive...

Tom Swift & friends decide to trial an experimental airship near the New Jersey coast, and are unexpectedly swept out to sea by hurricane winds. Unable to steer or navigate without tearing the airship apart, the hapless crew must simply let the storm take them wherever it will. Unfortunately, the storm proves too much for the craft and Tom makes a crash landing on the uninhabited and crumbling Earthquake Island.

Victor Hugo's Les Misérables is a novel which tells the story of ex-convict Jean Valjean, his struggles and eventual redemption. It's hailed by many critics as not just Victor Hugo's finest work but also one of the best French novels of all time. Like most epic novels written in the 19th century, the storyline of Les Misérables spans through several decades beginning in the early 1800s and culminating in the 1832 June Rebellion in Paris. The events related to the lives of the central characters in the novel are also tied to the great historical events of the time from the French Revolution to the June Rebellion...

One of the great literary tragedies of all time, The Hunchback of Notre Dame features some of the most well-known characters in all of fiction - Quasimodo, the hideously deformed bellringer of Notre-Dame de Paris, his master the evil priest Claude Frollo, and Esmeralda, the beautiful gypsy condemned for a crime she did not commit.

Hans of Iceland was written in 1821 and is the very first novel written by young Victor, years before he became the great Hugo. It has all the ingredients of a gothic novel: dreadful murders by the hand of a human monster, a young hero in love with the destitute heroine, royal court-intrigues and rebellious uprising, all set in dungeons, dark towers and the untamed nature of Norway.This audio-book has been recorded as Dramatic Reading with all the voices performed by one single reader, including laughs, sobs, groans, occasional screams and a lot of growls. I hope you will enjoy listening to this adventurous journey just as much as I enjoyed recording it. - Summary by Sonia

An amusing but deeply poignant story, “The Last Ditch” describes the wartime experiences of a British aristocratic family who gradually realize that their old feudal perquisites are passing away in the trenches of the Great War and that unprecedented new forces are pushing out the comfortable old ways. Lady Arles is the matriarch determined to resist to her last breath. Her bohemian young daughter Venice is set on a career as a poet and even dallies with a Socialist lover, but in some ways is the family member who seems the most helpless without her old aristocratic privileges...

Virginia Woolf is one of the most influential and controversial feminine figures in the literary life of the London society. Night and Day is one of her first novels published in 1919 which displays the moral and spiritual issues that people confront. The author herself was an emotionally unstable person, her episodes of mental illness and suicidal depression being recurrent and always brought into the public attention. The novel revolves around the life of the main character, Katherine Hilbery, a superb girl, free spirited and living in her twenties...

The Voyage Out is the first novel by Virginia Woolf, published in 1915 by Duckworth; and published in the U.S. in 1920 by Doran. One of Woolf's wittiest social satires.Rachel Vinrace embarks for South America on her father's ship and is launched on a course of self-discovery in a kind of modern mythical voyage. The mismatched jumble of passengers provide Woolf with an opportunity to satirize Edwardian life. The novel introduces Clarissa Dalloway, the central character of Woolf's later novel, Mrs...

The novel centers, in a very ambiguous way, around the life story of the protagonist Jacob Flanders, and is presented entirely by the impressions other characters have of Jacob [except for those times when we do indeed get Jacob's perspective]. Thus, although it could be said that the book is primarily a character study and has little in the way of plot or background, the narrative is constructed as a void in place of the central character, if indeed the novel can be said to have a 'protagonist' in conventional terms. Motifs of emptiness and absence haunt the novel and establish its elegiac feel.

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction...

"Mrs. Dalloway" recounts a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in the middle of June 1923. Clarissa Dalloway is a high society London lady. On that day, she is hosting a party, meeting people, going to the park, and reflecting on her choices. Where would she have been if she married Peter Walsh and not Richard Dalloway? What if she would not invite this or that person to her party? Her feelings about Peter Walsh grow because on that particular day he returns from India to settle some affairs in London...

Zadig, ou La Destinée, (”Zadig, or The Book of Fate”) (1747) is a famous novel written by the French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire. It tells the story of Zadig, a philosopher in ancient Babylonia. The author does not attempt any historical accuracy, and some of the problems Zadig faces are thinly disguised references to social and political problems of Voltaire’s own day. The book is philosophical in nature, and presents human life as in the hands of a destiny beyond human control. It is a story of religious and metaphysical orthodoxy, both of which Voltaire challenges with his presentation of the moral revolution taking place in Zadig himself...

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) was, according to Emma Goldman, “the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced.” Today she is not widely known as a consequence of her short life. De Cleyre was especially influenced by Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and Clarence Darrow. After the hanging of the Haymarket protesters in 1887, she became an anarchist. “Till then I believed in the essential justice of the American law of trial by jury,” she wrote in an autobiographical essay, “After that I never could”...

Brief, and in some cases incomplete, stories of magic from ancient Egypt.

The Bab Ballads are a collection of light verse by W. S. Gilbert, illustrated with his own comic drawings. Gilbert wrote the Ballads before he became famous for his comic opera librettos with Arthur Sullivan. In writing the Bab Ballads, Gilbert developed his unique “topsy-turvy” style, where the humour was derived by setting up a ridiculous premise and working out its logical consequences, however absurd. The Ballads also reveal Gilbert’s cynical and satirical approach to humour. They became famous on their own, as well as being a source for plot elements, characters and songs that Gilbert would recycle in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas...

This is a subset of the first twelve poems from the second collection of Gilbert’s “Bab Ballads” – light verses poking fun at the life and people of his time in Gilbert’s unique “topsy-turvey” style. The epitaph on his memorial on the Victoria Embankment in London is “HIS FOE WAS FOLLY AND HIS WEAPON WIT”, an epitaph amply exemplified in these verses.

Pinafore’s sublimely silly story is made even sillier by this 1908 story version of the 1878 Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Gilbert, the author of the operetta’s lyrics, writes this version of the story with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek. Most adults and children will find this version vastly amusing. - Summary by David Wales