This is a volume of fairy tales and folk tales from the Cossack people, compiled and translated by Robert Nisbet Bain. The tales are special as most children will not have heard them a hundred times before, and as they take listeners into a...

Eleven stories of eleven operas by Richard Wagner: Das Rheingold. Die Walküre. Siegfried. Götterdämmerung. Parsifal. Lohengrin. Tannhäuser. Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Rienzi. Die Fliegende Holländer. Tristan und Isolde. - Summary by david...

Charmides (Χαρμίδης) discusses the virtue of temperance. (Summary by Geoffrey Edwards)...

The Cossacks (1863) is an unfinished novel which describes the Cossack life and people through a story of Dmitri Olenin, a Russian aristocrat in love with a Cossack girl. This text was acclaimed by Ivan Bunin as one of the finest in the language....

Three Lives tells the stories of three women from the same fictitious town of Bridgeport. The first story is of Anna, a servant to the wealthy, or those who seem to be wealthy. She finds herself taking on "projects" in an effort to better the people...

Robert Bridges, who was appointed Poet Laureate in 1913, published three versions of his sonnet sequence, The Growth of Love: 1876 - 24 sonnets 1889 - 79 sonnets 1898 - 69 sonnets The second edition, which is the subject of this recording, was...

Jim, an axe-man for a sawmill, who is a hard-knuckled, two-fisted fighting man when he has to be, but is shy around women, longs to find a wife and settle down. Two women, one a mercenary widow of the country town, the other a classy city girl, both...

Clarence and Emmeline Mumford are in for a real treat when they take in the young, outspoken Miss Louise Derrick as their guest. Shedding a light on class struggles in the Victorian era, The Paying Guest offers a look at just what "proper society"...

El Dorado, by Baroness Orczy is a sequel book to the classic adventure tale, The Scarlet Pimpernel. It was first published in 1913. The novel is notable in that it is the partial basis for most of the film treatments of the original book. (Summary...

Sky Island (1912) was the second of three titles written by Baum featuring a spunky girl from California, Trot, and her companion, the old sailorman, Cap’n Bill. Baum had hoped to end the Oz series in 1910 and the following year he introduced Trot...

An Englishman is enjoying his dinner at Stephano's, at which he is a regular diner. A man enters quickly, sits at his table, starts eating his food, and hands him a packet underneath the table! So begins Paul Walmsley's acquaintance - and adventures...

H. G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds in 1898, when there was much speculation about life on the planet Mars. The book is considered to be one of the first science fiction novels. In the story, an English gentleman narrates the events of a violent...

Silas Marner (originally published in 1861): Betrayed by a beloved friend and accused of a crime he didn’t commit, awkward Silas Marner is expelled from his beloved religious community — the only community he has ever known. He exiles himself in the...

Science Fiction is speculative literature that generally explores the consequences of ideas which are roughly consistent with nature and scientific method, but are not facts of the author’s contemporary world. The stories often represent...

Though sometimes called the "Dark Ages", the period of Middle Ages is far from dull or uninteresting. In this book I. L. Plunket masterfully shows the colorfullness and diversity of the Middle Ages. Heroes like Charlemagne, Richard the Lion Hearted,...

THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE is a collection of essays reviewing contemporary authors on the literary scene at the turn of the century and assessing the uniquely American characteristics of their growing body of work. Excerpted from the...

More stories by Canadian Stephen Leacock. Some of these stories carry over characters introduced in Further Foolishness. Some stories are humourous; some are more thoughtful. It helps to be familiar with WWI-era European politics to catch much of...

The diamonds are gone--vanished! But who could have taken them? And how? With each plot twist author Thomas E. Price (writing as Amos Chiptree) takes the reader (and the diamonds) off in a new direction. ( Tom Penn)...

North and South is a social novel that tries to show the industrial North and its conflicts in the mid-19th century as seen by an outsider, a socially sensitive lady from the South. The story: the heroine, Margaret Hale, is the daughter of a...

This is a very short treatise on breads and cakes, published in 1921. The author is Claudia Quigley Murphy, a notable American journalist and suffragist. - Summary by Carolin...