George Eliot's Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life was first published in 1871-72 in a series of eight volumes. Set in 1829-32 in the fictitious town of Middlemarch, it follows several separate but related stories featuring a large cast of characters. In it, Eliot explores themes of marriage and women's roles in society, idealism and religion, self-interest and hypocrisy, and political reform and education. Featuring the realism th ...
Tess Durbeyfield, the daughter of an impoverished family, must navigate a world of desire and romance once she meets Alec d'Urberville. The son of a rich widow, he takes a fancy to her and gets her a position as the poultry keeper on his family's estate. However, her good fortune is soon complicated by Alec's libertine ways, and Tess returns home shamed. Once recovered, she separates herself from the gossip by finding work at a da ...
From Dorothy's modest Kansas farm, to the yellow-brick road, from the Wicked Witch of the West to the Emerald City, unforgettable icons abound in L. Frank Baum's classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. One of the most memorable stories in American history, this tale has spawned plays, sequels, and most notably the innovative 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz. With this brand new recording, follow Dorothy as she meets Munchkins, the Scarecrow, th ...
The Virginian is a 1902 debut novel set in the Wild West by the American novelist Owen Wister. Describing the life of a cowboy on a cattle ranch in Wyoming, it helped establish the western novel as a literary genre. The unnamed protagonist in The Virginian, who courts a local schoolteacher and defers personal revenge while meting out justice to a cattle thief, set the tone for the rough but civilized cowboy, a prototype for scores of ensuing boo ...
A cornerstone of African-American literary history, The Souls of Black Folk is a classic work by W. E. B. Du Bois. Originally published in 1903, it contains many essays on race and equality, but is also a piece of seminal history as laying the groundwork for the field of sociology. Some of the essays in the novel were even previously published by the Atlantic Monthly magazine. When writing, Du Bois drew from his personal experiences as an Africa ...
In Heart of Darkness, Polish-British author Joseph Conrad deploys atmosphere, ambiguity and nuance to spin a languid tale of intrigue and madness in late 19th-century Colonial Africa. The story's narrator, Marlow, tells of a trip up the Congo River to rescue a legendary ivory trader, Kurtz, from a mysterious illness. Considered Conrad's masterpiece, and one of the greatest novels of the 20th century (it was written and serialized in 18 ...
In The Secret Agent, a Soho shopkeeper is a member of a terrorist cell, supported by a foreign power, plotting to undermine the English state by means of a bomb plot. Published in 1907, it is considered to be among Conrad's finest novels, written at a time when he was moving away from the seafaring themes which he was known for. Prescient in its depictions of terrorism and political instability, it has become mandatory reading for anyone wi ...
Hopalong Cassidy, the iconic western cowboy hero conceived by Clarence Mulford, was immortalized in a highly popular film series starring William Boyd from 1935-1948. A tough-talking and violent character in print, Hopalong Cassidy was remade into a clean-cut screen hero who roamed the West with his sidekicks and fought villains who took advantage of the weak. Here Cassidy is drawn as Mulford originally conceived; rough-and-tumble, foul-mouthed, ...
Hopalong Cassidy is an iconic western cowboy hero conceived by Clarence Mulford, but immortalized in a series of films starring William Boyd from 1935-1948. A tough-talking and violent character in the print novels, Cassidy was remade into a clean-cut hero who traveled the West with his sidekicks fighting villains who took advantage of the weak. Clarence E Mulford takes you back to the beginning by relating the stories (as told to him by Red and ...
