Fiction audiobooks page 89

Shoes and Stockings: A Collection of Short Stories

Here are tales of love and war, modesty and frivolity, laughter and tears. Louisa May Alcott wrote many, many short stories. This collection shares but 7 of them.

The Didache

The Didache is the common name of a brief early Christian treatise (dated by most scholars to the late first or early second century), containing instructions for Christian communities. The text, parts of which may have constituted the first written catechism, has three main sections dealing with Christian lessons, rituals such as baptism and eucharist, and Church organization. It was considered by some of the Church Fathers as part of the New Testament but rejected as spurious or non-canonical by others, eventually not accepted into the New Testament canon with the exception of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church “broader canon.” The Roman Catholic Church has accepted it as part of the coll...

The Monk: A Romance

Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk: A Romance is a story of frustrated and unrequited desire between mentor and pupil mixed with elements of the supernatural. It includes several subplots: rape, torture and incest. It is the old story of the forces of good versus the forces of evil, except that in this one evil comes out ahead.

When The Monk was first published in 1795, it was received well by readers and reviewers causing a second edition to be printed the following year. But by the third year, there began a growing criticism of the book and of Lewis mostly on the basis of immorality. In fact, the book caused such a scandal that Lewis published another version complete with redact...

Empire
In a future time, the solar system is powered by one energy source, controlled by one huge organisation, which has plans to use this control to dominate the planets. Unknown to them, a couple of maverick scientists accidentally develop a completely new form of energy supply and threaten the corporation's monopoly. Naturally, the corporation can't allow this to happen... A stunning story about the manipulation of pure energy, climaxing in interstellar conflict.
Cinderella

If you are expecting glass slippers and pumpkin coaches, look elsewhere... This is "a pantomime as Ibsen would have written it, if only it had occurred to him to write one."

Set on a "bleak and cheerless heath overlooking the fjord" we meet Ibsenesque heroine Mrs. Inquest, her step-daughter Hilda, and her daughter Hedda, who is engaged to be married to the unfortunate Tesman. Thus begins Calderon's hilarious Ibsenesque version of Cinderella.

NOTE from the editor of the volume, published in 1922 after Calderon's death: This play is hardly more than a rough draft, written when the idea was fresh and put aside to be worked on when the right moment should come. Unhapp...
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, philosopher David Hume examines whether belief in God can be rational. The work takes the form of a debate between three characters: Cleanthes, who argues that the existence and nature of God can be empirically verified; Demea, who argues that God is completely beyond human knowledge; and Philo, a philosophical skeptic widely thought to represent Hume’s own beliefs.

Much of the debate centers around Cleanthes’ presentation of the analogical argument from design. According to this argument, the complexity and beauty of the universe can only be explained by inferring an intelligent designer, in the same way that one would infer a designer i...

Historical Tales
Volume I of a series containing anecdotes and stories, some well-known, others less so, of particular countries. This first volume comprises the discovery, colonization, founding, and early years of the United States of America, describing history for children and young adults in an exiting and novel manner.
Project Mastodon
Clifford Simak deals with the implications of time travel in his own unique way in this story. What if a group of guys did it on their own, without any help from government or industry? On a shoestring,so to speak? Would anyone believe them? What would you do if you could go back 150,000 years to a time when mastodons and saber toothed tigers roamed North America? And what happens when they run out of money? All these questions are explored in the usual humorous, wry Simak way in this story.
The Pirates of Ersatz

Bron is the offspring of infamous space pirates but instead of following in the family footsteps he decides to become an electronic engineer. Unfortunately, every time he tries to get out, something pulls him back in. This is a tongue-in-cheek space adventure along the lines of the Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison. It was originally published in the FEB-APR issues of Astounding Science Fiction in 1959.

The Wood Beyond the World
MANUAL OF SURGERY, OXFORD MEDICAL PUBLICATIONS
BY ALEXIS THOMSON, F.R.C.S.Ed.
PREFACE TO SIXTH EDITION Much has happened since this Manual was last revised, and many surgical lessons have been learned in the hard school of war. Some may yet have to be unlearned, and others have but little bearing on the problems presented to the civilian surgeon. Save in its broadest principles, the surgery of warfare is a thing apart from the general surgery of civil life, and the exhaustive literature now available on every aspect of it makes it unnecessary that it should receive detailed consideration in a manual for students. In preparing this new edition, therefore, we have endeavoured to incor...