Short Classics

One of Wodehouse's most entertaining raconteurs is sitting in the Angler's Rest, sipping hot whiskey and lemon. In particular, Wilfred, the creator of Raven Gypsy face cream and Snow of the Mountain lotion, lights on the formula for Buck-U-Uppo, a tonic given to elephants to enable them to face tigers with the necessary nonchalance.

Between 1922 and 1923, Katherine Mansfield wrote four volumes of short stories. This recording includes all sixty-three stories from the four collections, including a number of incomplete stories collated after Mansfield’s death.

His name is a byword for unspeakable horror and dread. Across ten stories this dark master holds a fascinating lure for all of us. Word by word, line by line we are drip-fed stomach-churning terror of a mesmerizing kind…

In Difficult Loves, Italy's master storyteller weaves tales in which cherished deceptions and illusions of love-including self-love-are swept away in magical instants of recognition. A soldier is reduced to quivering fear by the presence of a full-figured woman in his train compartment; a young clerk leaves a lady's bed at dawn; a young woman is isolated from bathers on a beach by the loss of her bikini bottom. Each of them discovers hidden truths beneath the surface of everyday life.

If you want to understand the daily life and psychology of the late Middle Ages, Ronald Ecker’s classic translation of The Canterbury Tales provides one of the very best means of doing so. Within its audio is to be found a broad range of society - high and low, male and female, rich and poor - who express their innermost beliefs and extravagant fantasies in a series of stories they tell as they make their way to Canterbury Cathedral.

In three beautifully crafted, dramatic acts, James's little-known novel unravels the painfully complicated emotional bonds which exist within a group of friends and lovers connected by two neighboring homes as they fight publicly for preferment, reciprocation, and successful marriage....

Nine of Wodehouse's funniest stories, as the Oldest Member reminisces about misadventures among the golf-obsessed. Including the eponymous 'goof' Ferdinand Dibble, a man whose non-success at golf has reduced him to such a state of diffidence as to hamper his romantic aspirations; high-stakes betting on the course among America's tainted millionaires; the heroic Rollo Podmarsh, persevering in the best round of his life under sentence of death; and the saga of William Bates, Jane Packard, and self-confessed vers libre poet Rodney Spelvin.

In Agatha Christie’s short story, “The Adventure of the Cheap Flat,” Poirot’s suspicions are aroused when he hears of a sweetheart deal on a flat. Doing a little freelance investigating, he soon learns that the flat is at the center of a case of international espionage and a potentially fatal double-cross. This short story originally appeared in the May 9, 1923 issue of The Sketch magazine.

The extraordinarily evocative stories depict the generation born in a small-town America during the Depression and growing up in a world where the old sexual morality was turned around and material comforts were easily had. Yet, as these stories reflect so accurately, life was still unsettling, and Updike chronicles telling moments both joyful and painful. The texts are taken from his recent omnibus, The Early Stories, 1953-1975.

A selection of Poe’s greatest tales: "The Purloined Letter", "The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade", "A Descent into the Maelstrom", "Von Kempelen and His Discovery", "Mesmeric Revelation", "The Facts in the Case of M. Valedemar", "The Black Cat", "The Fall of the House of Usher", "Silence", "The Mask of the Red Death", "The Cask of Amontillado", and more.

Life has the capacity of great moments and attainment, of lives well lived, fulfilling for ourselves and for those we touch. But for others life is arduous. There is no spark to ignite the curiosity, to explore and achieve a stability and a growth to their lives. Indeed their lives, in their own eyes, become almost meaningless, their sense of themselves subsumed under a myriad of problems, whether real or imagined. Seismic events in a life might crush them; the loss of a loved one for instance. Coping is difficult, support hard to find and isolation abounds.

Once, Hope Payne was a mermaid, performing at the local theme park and captivating audiences young and old. Today, she's married to a pragmatic marine biologist who has filled the pool in their backyard with flounder for a special study. Before he begins, the fish vanish - echoing a loss Hope alone can understand. She senses there's something underwater, something alive and hungry for more, but is she in too deep to ever resurface?

It's just townspeople picking numbers for the annual lottery...why, then, is there an ominous feeling to "The Lottery"? Find out just what this lottery is for, and listen to seven other unique stories. The collection reveals Jackson's remarkable range, from hilarious to horrifying, dealing with modern issues of alienation, empowerment, racism, and economic class.

The best and most revered works of famed poet and author, Edgar Allen Poe.

H.G. Wells (1866 -1946) - the master of the genre - created his "scientific romances" and set the standard for futuristic literature that also teemed with both social commentary and a prescient view of the world to come. Enjoy these two classics by the "father of science fiction".

A collection of classic works by Edgar Allan Poe, American author, poet, editor and literary critic. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

Arthur Conan Doyle ranked "The Red-Headed League" second in his list of his 12 favorite Sherlock Holmes stories. It is one of Holmes' most intriguing cases, in which he has to solve a problem caused by a strange society in which the only criteria for admission is bright red hair!

What is the terrible secret at the heart of The King in Yellow? The forbidden play’s second act is said to drive all those who read it mad. And the sinister text casts its shadow of dread over Robert W. Chambers’s collection of weird, supernatural stories of the same name. Threaded with elements of fantasy, science fiction, the supernatural, and gothic horror, this cult classic continues to inspire the imagination of artists - from H. P. Lovecraft to the writers of HBO’s True Detective - and delight connoisseurs of the macabre.

Listening to The Satires by Juvenal is to come face to face with the corruption, the debauchery, the waste, the sloth, and the mean-spirited greed of ancient Rome...or is it more like modern times? Indeed, these masterpieces of biting social commentary could easily have been written today about any number of metropolitan areas we are all familiar with.

Markham has returned to Seattle, searching for Katarina, the girl who, a decade ago, touched his soul, literally tearing it from his body. But what he discovers upon arriving is dark magick - of a most ancient and destructive kind! An encounter with a desperate spirit, leaping destructively from host to host, sets Markham on the trail of secretive cabal of magicians seeking to punch a hole through heaven, extinguishing forever the divine spark.