First published in Blackwood’s magazine as a three part serial in 1899 and published in 1902, Heart of Darkness centers on the experiences of protagonist Charles Marlow as he is assigned the duty to transport ivory down the Congo River. Conrad cleverly uses foreshadowing as a technique to convey the novella’s themes of hypocritical imperialism, the contradictory views on civilized as opposed to barbaric societies, racism, and the conflict between reality and darkness. Set in the second half of the nineteenth century, the story begins with the introduction of protagonist Charles Marlow, who is on board a boat harbored in the River Thames...

In this world of modern day spying, Joseph Conrad's spy story, The Secret Agent, is very pertinent. It deals with the over reaching influence of politics in everyday life, the sordid underbelly that lies beneath our civilization's sophisticated veneer, the strange persuasive power of anarchy, unbridled capitalism and its tragic consequences and the scourge of terrorism, exploitation and espionage. In an uncannily prophetic plot, The Secret Agent portrays a sinister scheme to bomb the famous Greenwich Observatory in London...

This story opens on a ship crowded with pilgrims traveling from Singapore to Mecca for the hajj. A young Englishman is the vessel's first mate. This is his first job and it is something that he has longed for all his life—to be on board a ship that sails the seven seas. One night as the ship sails through the calm waters of the Arabian Sea, it mysteriously begins to shudder. The crew, including the young first mate, believe that it is about to sink. They decide to strike out for themselves in a life-boat, abandoning the passengers...

First published in 1902 as a serial in Pall Mall Magazine, the adventure novel follows the disrupting events onboard a steamboat after it takes a perilous course at sea, which triggers a state of mayhem onboard the steamer. Furthermore, the incident prompts the crew to gradually reveal their true nature which is brought to light in the time of crisis. Interestingly, the tale is believed to possess some autobiographical elements taken from Conrad’s own experiences at sea, which provide the novel with a strong foundation, as he effectively uses personification, imagery, and descriptive language to accurately illustrate the danger and chaos instigated by a powerful storm at sea...

The Mirror of the Sea is a collection of autobiographical essays first published in various magazines 1904-6. Conrad early in his life earned his bread as a Master Mariner in sailing ships. In his Author’s Note to this work, Conrad states,”Beyond the line of the sea horizon the world for me did not exist….Within these pages I make a full confession not of my sins but of my emotions. It is the best tribute my piety can offer to the ultimate shapers of my character, convictions, and, in a sense, destiny—to the imperishable sea, to the ships that are no more, and to the simple men who have had their day.”

An autobiographical short story written in 1898 and included as the first story in the 1902 volume Youth, a Narrative, and Two Other Stories. This volume also includes Heart of Darkness and The End of the Tether, which are concerned with maturity and old age, respectively. “Youth” is narrated by Charles Marlow who is also the narrator of Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Chance. Youth depicts his first journey to the East.”

Classic shortish story by Conrad that relates his self-thought alienation from British society, as a young foreign man survives a shipwreck off the coast of Kent, England only to be shunned by most of the townsfolk. The one exception is the loving, if dull-witted, Miss Foster.

Set during the Napoleonic Wars, “The Point of Honor” (English title: “The Duel”) features two French Hussar officers, D’Hubert and Feraud. Their quarrel over an initially minor incident turns into a bitter, long-drawn out struggle over the following fifteen years, interwoven with the larger conflict that provides its backdrop. At the beginning, Feraud is the one who jealously guards his honor and repeatedly demands satisfaction anew when a duelling encounter ends inconclusively; he aggressively pursues every opportunity to locate and duel his foe...

Señor Gould is a native Costaguanan of English descent who owns the silver-mining concession in Sulaco. He is tired of the political instability in Costaguana and its concomitant corruption, and puts his weight behind the Ribierist project, which he believes will finally bring stability to the country after years of misrule and tyranny by self-serving dictators. Instead, the silver mine and the wealth it has generated become a magnet for local warlords to fight over, plunging Costaguana into a new round of chaos...

Tales of Unrest (1898) is the first collection of short stories by Joseph Conrad published in his lifetime.Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), a Polish-born English novelist, was a master in the formats of long short story and novella, a form of story longer than conventional short story but shorter than a novel. Some of Conrad's most acclaimed works have been written in these formats, most notably Heart of Darkness (1899).Tales of Unrest contains five stories; Karain: A Memory (written 1897; read by Jhiu), The Idiots (1896; read by Ann Boulais), An Outpost of Progress (1896; read by Kristine Bekere), The Return (1897; read by Raerity) and The Lagoon (1896; read by David Lazarus)...

A young untested ship captain finds a man named Leggatt clinging to the side of his ship. The Captain makes the unusual decision to hide Leggatt in his quarters. What is he thinking? Conrad will tell us. - The Secret Sharer was first published in the August and September 1910 issues of Harper’s Magazine

Recollections of the life of Axel Heyst, one-time manager of the liquidated Tropical Belt Coal Company in a fictitious island in the Pacific. After retreating from society in response to his professional failures, the misanthrope is drawn back by a romantic affair. (Introduction by S. Kovalchik)

A one-act play. Eccentric Captain Hagberd has been waiting for years for his son to come home from the sea. He has scrimped and saved, outfitting a house for Harry to inherit upon his return, which will be in only "one day more." He has also planned that Harry will marry Bessie, the repressed maiden next door. Note: The recording was done outside, so there will be some ambient noise (airplanes, lawn mowers, birds, children... etc).

Apparently a two part story about a Damsel and a Knight, perhaps a damsel who depends upon the kindness of strangers. It was originally entitled "Dynamite" and first published by installments in the New York Herald. The book itself was the biggest commercial success for Conrad up until that time, 1913. It allowed Conrad for the first time to settle his financial affairs. The author's disdain for people who live on the land is apparent. A new understanding of the word "enthusiastic" is promulgated. And it is a love story. Let us see how the tale goes.

An Outcast of the Islands is the second novel by Joseph Conrad, published in 1896, inspired by Conrad's experience as mate of a steamer, the Vigar. The novel details the undoing of Peter Willems, a disreputable, immoral man who, on the run from a scandal in Makassar, finds refuge in a hidden native village, only to betray his benefactors over lust for the tribal chief's daughter. The story features Conrad's recurring character Tom Lingard, who also appears in Almayer's Folly (1895) and The Rescue (1920), in addition to sharing other characters with those novels...

Under Western Eyes (1911) is a novel by Joseph Conrad. The novel takes place in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Geneva, Switzerland, and is viewed as Conrad's response to the themes explored in Crime and Punishment, Conrad being reputed to have detested Dostoevsky. It is also, some say, Conrad's response to his own early life; his father was a famous revolutionary imprisoned by the Russians, but, instead of following in his father's footsteps, at the age of sixteen Conrad left his native land forever...

Dedicated to the author's son who was wounded in World War 1, The Shadow-Line is a short novel based at sea by Joseph Conrad; it is one of his later works, being written from February to December 1915. It was first published in 1916 as a serial and in book form in 1917. The novella depicts the development of a young man upon taking a captaincy in the Orient, with the shadow line of the title representing the threshold of this development. The novella is notable for its dual narrative structure. The full, subtitled title of the novel is The Shadow-Line, A Confession, which immediately alerts the reader to the retrospective nature of the novella...

A European businessman and his Malayan wife have a daughter, Nina. A Malayan prince comes to do trade with the businessman and falls in love with the daughter. Conflict arises when other influences cause distrust in the business partnership and the daughter runs off to be with the prince.

La historia de El huésped secreto se abre con una minuciosa descripción del momento previo a la partida, del instante en que está por comenzar el viaje. El bar­co ha sido remolcado desde el puerto hasta la desem­bocadura del río Menam y desde allí, emprenderá el viaje cuando el viento se lo permita.El narrador protagonista de esta historia se encuen­tra en el umbral de la próxima experiencia: todos los preparativos para zarpar ya se han realizado, todo está listo; pero todavía no se ha iniciado el viaje...

"You are the expert in the psychological wilderness," the nominal narrator of this engaging tale says at one point to Marlow, who in practice serves as this novel's chief discoverer of hidden events, and commentator on the vagaries of human behaviour. In "Chance", these are notable chiefly in the actions of various parties — some well-meaning, some blinded by their own lofty idealism, and others frankly exploitative — who in various ways meddle in the fate of Flora de Barrall, an innocent young woman who just happens to be the only child of a fascinatingly bland and self-deluded fraudster who proves to be a very nasty piece of work indeed...

"But it is a vain enterprise for sophisticated Europe to try and understand these doings." Set in St Petersburg and Geneva, this austere and claustrophobic psycho-political tragedy focusses on the terrible plight of Razumov, a bright young student without family ties whose chance to live his own life is snatched from him the moment a fellow student takes refuge in his room after helping assassinate a Russian statesman. Razumov's profound sense of grief and bitterness at the cruel logic of his predicament...

"Here speaks the man of masts and sails, to whom the sea is not a navigable element, but an intimate companion. The length of passages, the growing sense of solitude, the close dependence upon the very forces that, friendly to-day, without changing their nature, by the mere putting forth of their might, become dangerous to-morrow, make for that sense of fellowship which modern seamen, good men as they are, cannot hope to know." In this volume of essays, more than in any other single work, we get...

An impossibly imperturbable old sea captain, with two hundred Chinese labourers aboard his steamship, faces a terrifying typhoon for the first time in his life. When emigré Austrian peasant Yanko is washed up on an English beach, he encounters widespread hostility from the local people on account of his foreign ways, and only in time earns a meagre measure of grudging respect. Captain Falk — seemingly half man, half tug boat - desperately loves a shapely young woman, but standing in the way of any possible match is a most delicate question indeed...

This short tale was first published in book form alongside 'Heart of Darkness' and 'The End of the Tether', the three tales representing youth, middle age and old age, respectively. One of Conrad's 'Marlow yarns', the story is based on the trouble-plagued, much-delayed and ultimately ill-fated voyage of the cargo vessel 'Palestine' carrying coal from England to Bangkok in 1882-1883, on which Conrad served his first posting as second mate. The story is notable in the light-hearted buoyancy of the narrator's tone as he confronts difficulty after difficulty.

While it's not often described as such, "Lord Jim" can be viewed as a kind of love story whose real theme is the close bond which develops between an older and worldly-wise sea captain, Marlow, and a deeply troubled young sailor called Jim who, in the opening phase of the story, commits an act of reprehensible cowardice for which he is publicly shamed. While the novel's nominal focus rests squarely on Jim and his subsequent attempts to rebuild a sense of self-worth through his involvement in the...

A brave Malay chieftain suffers from a surprising vulnerability. After giving birth to a series of unfortunate children, a farmer's wife is determined to bear no more. A spoonful of sugar brings a neophyte ivory trader to a moment of Nietzschean self-realisation. A pompous ass discovers that his wife has run off with another man. Secluded in an eerie lagoon, a Malay carries a guilty secret in his heart. "Tales of Unrest" was the first volume of short fiction Joseph Conrad published in his own lifetime...

This, Conrad's second, novel serves as an illuminating prequel of his first, 'Almayer's Folly', teasing out the origins of the factional tensions that are such a distinctive feature of the social life of the little settlement of Sambir, on the Pantai river in Borneo, that figure so prominently in its predecessor. The central plot has an almost mythic quality , the role of the 'king' in this case being played by Captain Tom Lingard, a swashbuckling if somewhat simple-minded freebooter who for many...

Joseph Conrad was born in former Poland, spent part of his childhood exiled in Russia because of his father's Polish nationalist political activities, learned and read French early, and did not speak a word of English until his late teens. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that when Conrad came to write this, his first novel, it centred on the pain of having a contested sense of identity, the experience of having to choose, in the midst of argument and derision, whether one was really 'this or that'...

In this powerful novella based on Joseph Conrad's own experiences in the Belgian Congo, Charles Marlow, an experienced seaman, tells a small group of friends about a profoundly disturbing episode in his life where he was employed by a large colonising enterprise to sail a tinpot steamer up a river into the heart of Africa with a view to bringing out an ivory trader who had gone rogue. Conrad biographer Maya Janasoff has argued that while Marlow's descriptions of Africans are crudely racist, the author binds this racist language with "a potentially radical suggestion...

In Nostromo, Joseph Conrad has transformed an apocryphal anecdote about a sailor who got away with stealing a boat loaded with silver into a grandly panoramic, yet deeply unsettling, narrative that sees every conceivable type of political person — from the laughably oafish and brutal to various shades of the well-meaning — caught up in an episode of revolutionary upheaval in the fictional South American country of Costaguana. Who, if anyone, will emerge from this dreadful saga with a shred of dignity left intact? - Summary by Peter Dann

Taking as his inspiration the historical accidental death by explosion of an anarchist outside the Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park, London in 1894, Conrad tells the dark tale of Adolf Verloc, an indolent, double-dealing secret agent of a foreign government pressured into committing an act of "shocking senselessness" against astronomy, of all things. As the novel bleakly, but with occasional streaks of humour, sifts the hidden motives of London anarchists and revolutionaries, police and government officials, and indeed of Verloc and his own immediate family, nearly all emerge, in their own way, as secret agents of a kind, not quite who they purport to be.

A seafaring novella in which those manning ships are pitted against the forces of nature. A typical Conrad exploration of human beings under emotional strain with the consequences for social and spiritual existence. - Summary by Anthony Ogus

This is Joseph Conrad's last novel. Citizen Peyrol returns to his native France against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. The arrival of young Lieutenant Real necessitates another mission of danger, patriotism and heroism from Peyrol. Summary by kathrinee

Heart of Darkness tells the story of an English seaman, Charles Marlow, who embarks on a voyage up the Congo River and into the African wilderness. He soon becomes obsessed with the success of an ivory trading commander, Kurtz. Little does he know, Kurtz has been consumed with darkness and has begun his descent into madness... Summary by cadastra.

The Secret Agent tells the story of Adolf and Winnie Verloc. He is a phony anarchist and agent provocateur of the title, and the plot centres around the terrible consequences for their family when he is pressured into planning a terrorist act. It also bleakly satirises early 20th Century anarchism and the operations of the police and intelligence forces, while being none too complimentary about the media and general public either. Summary by Cori Samuel.

Almayer’s Folly is about a poor businessman who dreams of finding a hidden gold mine and becoming very wealthy. Kaspar Almayer is a white European. He agrees to marry a native Malayan captured by Captain Tom Lingard, his employer, believing the marriage will bring him riches even though he has no love for the woman. They have one daughter named Nina. Almayer relocates with his wife to Malaysian where he hopes to build a trading company and find gold mines. His hopeless daydreams of riches and splendor cause his native wife to loath him...