Showing results by narrator "Walter Zimmerman" in All Categories

Tolstoy is primarily known for his impressively long novels, but he also wrote some wonderful short stories. This one, dealing with ambition and greed, has an unforgettable message.

Nathaniel Hawthorne has taken some of the most striking and exciting Greek legends and adapted them for young readers. In this retelling, Hawthorne maintains the conceptions held by the original authors. This collection includes "The Minotaur", "The Pygmies", "The Dragon's Teeth", "Circe's Palace", "The Pomegranate Seeds", and "The Golden Fleece".

Emile Zola, along with fellow novelists Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert, was an early realist in French literature. In novels such as Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Zola's Nana, sex and violence were examined with vivid clarity. These realists soon adopted the word naturalism to describe their writings.

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 near Dorchester in that part of England he called Wessex. With stories sometimes from his own imagination and sometimes from local tradition, Hardy's work, like Dickens and Trollope, creates a strong sense of mood and location. Hardy hoped to be remembered for his poetry, but ours is not a poetic age. Thus his claim to a new generation of readers rests on his prose. There are great similarities between his era, a time of challenge, and our own.

Holmes is confronted with the disappearance of the bride of a nobleman - just minutes after the ceremony. "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor" is one of the 56 original Sherlock Holmes stories and was first published in Strand Magazine in April 1892. It served as the (loose) basis for The Eligible Bachelor, a film starring Jeremy Brett as Holmes, Edward Hardwicke as Watson, and Simon Williams as Lord St. Simon.

"The Bet" is one of Chekov's most anthologized stories. A rich banker makes a bet with a poor artist that he cannot voluntarily stay imprisoned for a long period of time. The result of the bet is quite different than either man could have supposed.

A literary giant of the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson made lasting contributions to English literature as an essayist, moralist, poet, biographer, literary critic and editor. His philosophical novella Rasselas became so popular that it was translated into five languages. A new English edition was published every year and even today there are multiple print editions available.

This choice collection of spine tingling tales runs the gamut from slightly spooky to "I'm sleeping with all the lights on tonight!" A splendid grouping of tales from the pens of some of the great writers of the past. Enjoy these classic stories alone or with a friend, whenever your ears are free.

The Phantom of the Opera is a Gothic novel, combining romance, horror, mystery, and tragedy. The story is about a mysterious figure who terrorizes a Paris opera house for the unwitting benefit of a young singer he loves.

In the story, a land owner named Vasili Andreevich Brekhunov takes along one of his peasants, Nikita, for a short journey to the house of the owner of a forest. He is impatient and wishes to get to the town more quickly to purchase the forest before other contenders can get there. They find themselves in the middle of a blizzard, but the master in his avarice wishes to press on. They eventually get lost off the road and they try to camp. The master's peasant soon finds himself suffering from hypothermia.

No one plumbs deeper depths of the psyche than French and Russian authors. This second wide-ranging collection of 19th-century literary masterworks, presented in their entirety, not only entertains, but provides insight into 19th-century mores and the mysteries of human nature.

"The King of the Golden River" is the magical story of a boy named Gluck, his evil brothers, and a dangerous quest to find treasure lurking in the Golden River. It is a classic tale and the only fairy tale the famous English author and critic ever wrote. It could also be classified as a fable or parable since it it explains "how things came to be".

Watson visits Sherlock Holmes at Christmastime and finds him contemplating a battered old hat, brought to him by the commissionaire Peterson after it and a Christmas goose had been dropped by a man in a scuffle with some street ruffians. Peterson takes the goose home to eat it, but comes back later with a precious carbuncle that his wife found in the bird's crop.

By the time Dostoevsky was 40, he had spent four years in prison and a further four years in the army as punishment for his part in a political conspiracy. His health was broken. He was gaunt, fervid, anxiety-ridden, and close to bankruptcy. It was in this state he wrote Notes from the Underground, a masterpiece of the psychology of theoutsider.

Hamlin Garland is mostly remembered today for his innovative collections of short stories; Main Travelled Roads is his most famous collection. It contains six stories and is an undisputed American classic.

C. Auguste Dupin is a Frenchman who decides to solve the mysterious brutal murder of two women in Paris. Numerous witnesses are quoted in the newspaper as having heard a suspect, though the witnesses each think it was a different language. As the first true detective in fiction, the Dupin character established many literary devices which would be used in future fictional detectives including Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot.

Guy de Maupassant is considered one of the fathers of the modern short story as well as one of the form's finest writers. His stories are characterized by their economy of style and efficient, seemingly effortless dénouements

In the wonderful fairy tale, Charles Dickens creates a number of memorable characters, including a King, who also has a regular office job and is always running out of money, his lovely wife, the Queen and their 17 children, as well as an elderly and very cranky fairy who gives their eldest daughter a magic fishbone she can use to grant one wish. However it will only work if the "circumstances are right".

"A Scandal in Bohemia" was the first of Arthur Conan Doyle's 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories to be published in The Strand Magazine. Holmes did not think much of the "fair sex" until the met a character in this story, Irene Adler, who became to him "the woman".

This short but powerful novel was acclaimed by Vladimir Nabokov and Mahatma Gandhi as the greatest in the whole of Russian literature. It is one of Tolstoy's most celebrated pieces of late fiction. At the center of the story is an examination of the nature of both life and death and how man can come to terms with death's inevitability. It was widely acclaimed when it was published in 1886 and remains a compelling narrative today.