Literature audiobooks page 89

This novel was published a full 14 years before the sinking of the Titanic, but listeners may be surprised at how many parallels this fictional tale has with subsequent true events.

The Titan is the largest and most technologically advanced steamship of her time. She is considered unsinkable. Her full speed crossings of the Northern Lane Route carry her rich passengers in the highest standards of luxury and comfort. The less well-off travel in rougher quarters but still benefit from the speed of travel. These crossings, however, are fraught with navigational hazards, the greatest of which is ice.

Unlike the ship, one member of her crew is not of the highest standard. At lea...

Tales of Men and Ghosts was published as a collection in 1910, though the first eight of the stories had earlier appeared in Scribner's and the last two in the Century Magazine. Despite the title, the men outnumber the ghosts, since only "The Eyes" and "Afterward" actually call on the supernatural. In only two of the stories are women the central characters, though elsewhere they play important roles. Wharton enjoys subjecting her subjects -- all of them American gentlemen and gentlewomen, in the conventional senses of the word -- to various moral tests and sometimes ironic tests. Some of the stories deal with the intellectual fashions of the day -- "The Blond Beast" basing itself, to som...

In this May Sinclair wartime masterpiece, dashing newsman Walter Furnival is an absurdly good catch: handsome, successful, athletic, intelligent, an upstanding epitome of manhood and rectitude. Tasker Jevons is a puny, preposterous, impossible-looking, bombastic sports writer, without one single redeeming social grace. Imagine the jealous mortification of Furny when his enchanting young typist and love interest Viola Thesiger chooses the clownish Jevons as a lover, seeing in him a remarkable inner beauty not evident to anyone but her and (as he grudgingly but magnanimously admits) the long-suffering and devoted Furnival. But despite the title, the central character of this extraordinary n...

Flutist Aaron Sisson is caught up in the aftermath of WWI. A lost soul, he attempts to find himself in the comfort of bar-room talk and alcohol and a woman. Moving on, he spends time with a mining executive's relatives. But he finds the family a stuffy middle-class lot, bored with each other and themselves. He leaves his wife and children and strikes out for the open road. During a playing engagement at an opera performance, he reunites with the mining executive's family. Talk is of love and war, none of it very satisfying to anyone. At dinner with one of the women, Aaron reveals that he is indifferent to most things in life and just wants to be left alone. So it goes with this lost soul ...

Maximilian erzählt seiner kranken Freundin auf Anraten des Arztes "närrische Geschichten", damit sie ruhig liegen bleibt. Die Geschichten sind romantisch fantastisch, erinnern an Hoffmann und Tieck.
Heine schrieb am 3. Mai 1836 an August Ewald:" Aus dieser zweiten florentinischen Nacht werden Sie vielleicht ersehen, daß ich nötigenfalls, wenn Politik und Religion mir verboten werden, auch vom Novellenschreiben leben könnte. Ehrlich gesagt, dergleichen würde mir nicht viel Spaß machen, ich finde dabei wenig Amüsement. Man muß aber alles können in schlechten Zeiten."
Heine konnte auch das Novellenschreiben, sehr zum Amüsement der Leser, allerdings machte es ihm so wenig Spaß, da...

Susan Coolidge was the pen name of Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, who is best known for her What Katy Did series. This is the first of three volumes of her verse.

When the first part of "Pelle Erobreren" (Pelle the Conqueror) appeared in 1906, its author, Martin Andersen Nexo, was practically unknown even in his native country, save to a few literary people who knew that he had written some volumes of stories and a book full of sunshiny reminiscences from Spain. And even now, after his great success with "Pelle," very little is known about the writer. He was born in 1869 in one of the poorest quarters of Copenhagen, but spent his boyhood in his beloved island Bornholm, in the Baltic, in or near the town, Nexo, from which his final name is derived. There, too, he was a shoemaker's apprentice, like Pelle in the second part of the book, which resemble...

Howell’s novel is set in New York of the late nineteenth century, a city familiar to readers of Edith Wharton and Henry James. Basil March, a businessman from Boston of a literary bent, moves with his family to New York to edit a new journal founded by an acquaintance. Its financial support, however, comes from a Mr. Dryfoos, a Pennsylvania Dutch farmer suddenly become millionaire by the discovery of natural gas on his property, and now living in New York with his family in a style he hopes will befit his new wealth.

Is it his new fortune that presents a hazard? Or is it the new wealth of New York City in the Gilded Age? Both March and his literary creator are increasingly aware of s...

Der Schuß von der Kanzel ist eine humoristische Novelle von Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825–1898), die vom Werk Gottfried Kellers beeinflusst ist und zwischen Mai und August 1877 entstanden ist. Sie wurde erstmals im Zürcher Taschenbuch auf das Jahr 1878 veröffentlicht.

Set in Florence's Anglo-American colony in the late 19th century, this is a romantic story of a middle-aged man, returning to the scene of his first but disappointed love twenty years earlier. The doings of Americans abroad were staples of the fictions of Henry James and Edith Wharton, but Howells’s view is rather different. As John Updike has said of it, “the felicity of the writing makes us pause in admiration….A midlife crisis has rarely been sketched in fiction with better humor, with gentler comedy and more gracious acceptance of life’s irrevocability.” ( Nicholas Clifford)