Literature audiobooks page 67

Novelle per un anno è una raccolta di 241 novelle scritte da Luigi Pirandello. Originariamente sono state pubblicate sul Corriere della Sera, successivamente ripubblicate in 15 raccolte. Inizialmente erano previste 24 raccolte contenenti 365 novelle, tuttavia la prematura morte dell’autore ha impedito il raggiungimento del traguardo. Postume sono state pubblicate altre novelle scritte dall’autore. Le raccolte sono state pubblicate tra il 1922 e il 1938.

This is Edith Wharton's earliest published collection of short stories (1899). Like much of her later work, they touch on themes of marriage, male/female relationships, New York society, and the nature and purpose of art. One of the stories, "The Twilight of the God," is written as a short play. The role of Warland is read by mb, and the role of Oberville by Bruce Pirie.

Cousin Betty (La Cousine Bette), published in serial format in 1846, was one of the last and greatest of Balzac's works. It was part of his long novel collection titled La Comédie Humaine. Set in mid-19th-century France, it tells the story of a woman who resents her position as a "poor relation." As we follow her schemes to bring ruin upon the more privileged members of her family, we see a society in transition. The stability and idealism of the old order give way to a new bourgeois world in which virtue is strangled in the struggle for power and money. In this novel, Balzac searchingly probes the psychology and motivations of his characters: his work influenced the development of litera...

Phillis Wheatley was the first African-American to publish a book of poetry in 1773. Born in West Africa, she was sold into slavery at age seven, and bought by a wealthy Massachusetts family who taught her to read and write. Her extraordinary literary gifts led to the publication of her "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral," and to her eventual emancipation by her owners. Although some of the poems demonstrate an apparent acceptance of the racist values of the white slave-owning classes (which viewed Africans as savage), Wheatley's considerable talents simultaneously contradicted these stereotypes.

John Wesley, along with his brother Charles, are credited with founding the Methodist denomination. "The following Sermons contain the substance of what I have been preaching for between eight and nine years last past. Every serious man who peruses these, will therefore see, in the clearest manner, what these doctrines are which I embrace and teach as the essentials of true religion." The third through fifth series contain sermons on a wide variety of topics, from sermons preached at funerals, to natural disasters, to the roles of elders and deacons.

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) was, according to Emma Goldman, “the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced.” Today she is not widely known as a consequence of her short life. De Cleyre was especially influenced by Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and Clarence Darrow. After the hanging of the Haymarket protesters in 1887, she became an anarchist. “Till then I believed in the essential justice of the American law of trial by jury,” she wrote in an autobiographical essay, “After that I never could”. She was known as an excellent speaker and writer – in the opinion of biographer Paul Avrich, she was “a greater literary talent than any other American anarchist” –...

Eugene Field, Sr. was an American writer, best known for his children's poetry and humorous essays.

In May Sinclair’s remarkable first novel, Audrey Craven is a beautiful young woman who has by her idiosyncracies acquired a thoroughly undeserved reputation for originality. In fact, Audrey is a shallow, selfish, malleable person of negligible intelligence, with a fastidious horror of anyone who might be considered a nobody. Her pursuit of the stimulation of extraordinary minds (and her persistent fantasy of being somebody’s Muse) brings her into contact with serious women and men representing the profoundest passions of art, religion, science, and love. The question is, will these encounters prove to be her salvation, or will her vindictive self-centeredness damage the ardent lives she t...

A bit of a menage-a-quatre in a remote cabin in the wilderness as fugitive Hugh, his younger brother Pete, nursemaid and cook Bella, and now the newly arrived snow-blinded young Sylvie who had been snatched from near death in the snow by the heroic but moody Hugh. Because of her blindness, Sylvie is led to believe her rescuer to be a handsome and dashing hero; his younger brother to be but a young lad of 14; and Bella a matronly old maid. But Sylvie would, in time, form her own image of the clan and attempt to bring them together as they were destined to be split apart. Demonstration lies herein of the inherent ability of the blind to use their other senses to best any situation la...

Yvain, the Knight of the Lion is a romance by Chrétien de Troyes. It was probably written in the 1170s simultaneously with Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, and includes several references to the action in that poem. In the poem, Yvain seeks to avenge his cousin Calogrenant who had been defeated by an otherworldly knight beside a magical storm-making fountain in the forest of Broceliande.