Résultats Éditeur "Brilliance Audio" dans Classiques

Diminutive, bespectacled, and endearing, Father Brown only appears unworldly. But the cherubic parish priest is privy to the inner workings of the most surprising of sinners. And as an amateur sleuth, he intuits motives for Essex's unsolvable crimes. One of the most beloved characters in 20th-century detective fiction, the kindly cleric leverages his unrivaled insights into human nature to decipher 12 ingenious mysteries from the witty and clever mind of G. K. Chesterton.

Without family or means, the strong-willed Lucy Snowe escapes the English countryside for the town of Villette. Though overwhelmed by a new culture and a foreign language, Lucy finds employment at an all-girls boarding school. Her self-reliance is soon compromised by her affections for two men: the kindhearted Dr. Bretton and the imperious professor M. Paul Emanuel. As Lucy longs for both independence and passion in a patriarchal society, fate plays its hand.

Daisy Miller is a beautiful American girl abroad. Assured, flirtatious, and at odds with reserved European etiquette, she meets two men: Mr. Winterbourne, a world-weary compatriot in full pursuit, and Mr. Giovanelli, a passionate Italian with questionable motives. Unmindful of the scandals she incites and of the risks to her reputation, Daisy believes that she is also impervious to fate.

In a long-unoccupied mansion, a new mother is confined to what was once a nursery. She is assured by her physician husband that it is a necessary cure to ease her "nervous depression." Isolated and powerless, she becomes obsessed with the peeling, sickly colored wallpaper. In it, she sees what no one else can: a prisoner desperate to escape its maddening design. A condemnation of the patriarchy, The Yellow Wallpaper explores with terrifying economy the oppression, grave misunderstanding, and willful dismissal of women in late nineteenth-century society.

A novel based on the emotional conflict centered around a son’s urge to sever the psychological umbilical cord which ties him to a selfish and possessive mother. Completely unsympathetic to his young experiences and inclinations, forever critical of his interests and reactions, she nevertheless appeals to his sympathies and attempts to hold him emotionally.

At the heart of Harriet E. Wilson’s autobiographical novel is Frado, the young daughter of a mixed-race couple, who is exploited first by a middle-class New England white family and then by an opportunistic husband on the abolitionist lecture circuit. In adopting the nineteenth-century conventions of both the sentimental novel and the narratives of enslaved people, Wilson delivered a scathing and ironic indictment of the racism of the antebellum North.

Believing fiction to be an invaluable tool for social change, Pauline E. Hopkins used her first novel to challenge the racist and sexist assumptions of her time. Contending Forces operates on an epic scale - with settings ranging from antebellum North Carolina to post-Civil War Boston - and Hopkins surveys this panorama with an eye in particular on the intersections of race, class, and gender relations.

Northern-educated physician Kenneth Harper moves back to his hometown in Georgia with a relatively modest goal: he wants to start his own medical practice. He hopes that racist prejudices have relaxed enough to allow room for someone like him, but the local presence of the Ku Klux Klan offers some sense of how little the community has actually changed. In response to that reality, Harper seeks to liberate local sharecroppers from white landowners via a cooperative society - but that’s something the area’s ruling class simply cannot abide.

When the free-spirited Zora and the ambitious Bles first meet, they strike up an immediate friendship - one that seems destined to mature into love. That emotional journey is disrupted, however, by the crushingly oppressive forces that surround them in the post-Reconstruction South. Zora’s desire for personal growth takes her to New York, where she finds work as a domestic servant, while Bles travels to Washington, DC, for an education in politics. Disillusioned by the corruption and hypocrisy of the North, they eventually return home with a new dream altogether.

A civil rights activist and key figure in African American literary history, Alice Dunbar-Nelson made her mark during the emerging Harlem Renaissance. Violets and Other Tales is her debut (included here in full, save for three stories later updated in The Goodness of St. Rocque). The collection includes poetry, short stories, and essays offering a varied examination of class differences, racial identity, oppression, intolerance, and women’s societal roles. The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories assembles 14 of Dunbar’s short works of fiction.

Drawing on the 1898 overthrow of the Wilmington, North Carolina, government by white supremacists, Charles W. Chesnutt’s classic novel unmasked the racism of the post-Reconstruction South.

Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter is rooted not only in the horrific reality of institutional slavery but also in the historical fact of Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with the enslaved Sally Hemings (here represented by the character Currer). In William Wells Brown’s telling, Currer has two daughters by Jefferson, Clotel and Althesa. Both become Jefferson’s legal property when they are born, and both wind up at auction - along with their mother - when Jefferson dies.

In this fictional confession, an unnamed narrator reveals the “great secret” of his life: he was born mixed race - and his ability to pass as white has provided him a unique perspective on America’s profound racial prejudice. As he recounts his experiences in the American South, the suburbs of the Northeast, New York City jazz clubs, and various European capitals, he also grapples with the emotional fallout of a life lived in constant fear of discovery - a life lived, in other words, in a culture unaccountably preoccupied with the shade of a person’s skin.

Big-game hunter Sanger Rainsford has washed ashore on isolated Ship-Trap Island in the Caribbean Sea. On the island he finds the palatial château of General Zaroff and his hungry hounds. There, Rainsford becomes party to a twisted sport. Zaroff hunts too. And his preferred game is human. The trapped and terrified Rainsford is given a three-hour advantage to disappear into the jungle. If he can survive for three days, he will be set free. Beyond that, there are no rules. It’s Rainsford’s need to survive versus Zaroff’s desire to kill. Time to play.

A striking mosaic of prose, poetry, and dramatic dialogue, Jean Toomer’s Cane has come to be considered a masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance. Structured as a series of vignettes ripe with longing, passion, violence, and revenge, the haunting novel gives a powerful voice to the interior lives of African Americans in the rural South and urban North. Championed for its unsparing honesty and psychological insight by such luminaries as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou, Cane shines as a beacon to generations of African-American writers.

When Alice steps through a mirror, she enters a reflection of her world where backwards is forwards, the future is remembered, and only the opposite of logic makes sense. Increasingly befuddled, she’s challenged by the belligerent Humpty Dumpty, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the nonsense rhymes of the Jabberwocky, and the discovery that she’s a pawn in a living game of chess. To become queen and find her way home, Alice must play.

Poet Gabriel Syme believes in the beauty of order and, as such, is recruited by Scotland Yard to an anti-anarchist police corp. While undercover, Syme meets fellow poet Lucian Gregory, a verse writer devoted to disorder, who introduces him to London’s anarchist underworld. Just as Gregory is to be elected to the central council, Syme’s cover is revealed and he is forced to make a decision that sends the cabal into chaos. Is anyone in this underground faction who or what they seem? Syme suddenly realizes he doesn’t have all the answers.

Of all the ghostly lore that bedevils Sleepy Hollow, none terrifies more than the galloping spectre of the Headless Horseman. Few in the haunted glen are as susceptible to the tale as the superstitious schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane. But just as bewitching - and bewildering - to Ichabod is the elusive coquette Katrina Van Tassel. On an autumn eve, Ichabod attends a harvest party, hoping to finally woo the woman of his dreams. Instead, he sees his worst nightmares come true.

Ten years ago, Mary Morstan’s father, an officer in an Indian regiment, vanished. Four years later, elegant pearls began to arrive, six in total, and now she holds an invitation to meet her mysterious anonymous benefactor. As Miss Morstan shares this peculiar tale with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, she urges the detectives to accompany her. Her only clues to her father’s disappearance: a map of a fortress with the names of four strangers and an assertion that she’s been dreadfully wronged.

When peddler John Durbeyfield learns that he may be a descendant of a noble family, he sends his oldest child, Tess, to “claim kin.” Blindly ushered into harm’s way, the strong-willed yet untinctured peasant girl is not prepared for the blighted course her life will take. Nor for those whose destructive desires will determine her fate, and force Tess to make only the most desperate of choices. From her tragic loss of innocence through betrayal and revenge, Tess’s struggle for survival challenged the era’s mores and the cruel indifference shown women in Victorian society.