Showing results by narrator "Walter Zimmerman" in All Categories

Nathaniel Hawthorne has taken some of the most striking and exciting Greek legends and adapted them for young readers. In this retelling, Hawthorne maintains the conceptions held by the original authors. This collection includes "The Minotaur", "The Pygmies", "The Dragon's Teeth", "Circe's Palace", "The Pomegranate Seeds", and "The Golden Fleece".

Tolstoy is primarily known for his impressively long novels, but he also wrote some wonderful short stories. This one, dealing with ambition and greed, has an unforgettable message.

No one plumbs deeper depths of the psyche than French and Russian authors. This second wide-ranging collection of 19th-century literary masterworks, presented in their entirety, not only entertains, but provides insight into 19th-century mores and the mysteries of human nature.

"The King of the Golden River" is the magical story of a boy named Gluck, his evil brothers, and a dangerous quest to find treasure lurking in the Golden River. It is a classic tale and the only fairy tale the famous English author and critic ever wrote. It could also be classified as a fable or parable since it it explains "how things came to be".

The writer who did most to establish prose as a force in Russian literary culture was Nikolai Gogol. Gogol's example combined with the pronouncements of the literary critics of the period, established prose as the literary medium of the future. Fyodor Dostoevsky is supposed to have said, referring to himself and his fellow Realists, "We have all come out from under Gogol's "Overcoat".

Watson visits Sherlock Holmes at Christmastime and finds him contemplating a battered old hat, brought to him by the commissionaire Peterson after it and a Christmas goose had been dropped by a man in a scuffle with some street ruffians. Peterson takes the goose home to eat it, but comes back later with a precious carbuncle that his wife found in the bird's crop.

"A Scandal in Bohemia" was the first of Arthur Conan Doyle's 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories to be published in The Strand Magazine. Holmes did not think much of the "fair sex" until the met a character in this story, Irene Adler, who became to him "the woman".

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!

By the time Dostoevsky was 40, he had spent four years in prison and a further four years in the army as punishment for his part in a political conspiracy. His health was broken. He was gaunt, fervid, anxiety-ridden, and close to bankruptcy. It was in this state he wrote Notes from the Underground, a masterpiece of the psychology of theoutsider.

A Christmas Carol is undoubtedly the most famous supernatural story in English. However, it was not the only supernatural story of the season that Charles Dickens wrote. In Victorian England, Christmas was the time to explore the supernatural in stories, and Charles Dickens was one of the best at it. Included in this volume are a full-cast dramatization of A Christmas Carol, plus three more of Dickens' best stories of the season.

The Purloined Letter is one of Edgar Allan Poe's detective stories. It is the third of the three stories featuring the detective C. Auguste Dupin, the other two being The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Mystery of Marie Roget. These stories are considered important forerunners of the modern detective story. The Method Poes detective, Dupin, uses to solve the crime was quite innovative. He tried to identify with the criminal and to "think like he would."

Selma Lagerlöf and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson were two of the greatest nineteenth centurey Nordic authors who were both awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Lagerlof was a Swedish novelist, who in 1909 became the first woman writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Her work is deeply rooted in Nordic legends and history. She turned away from the dominating realistic movement and wrote in a romantic and imaginative manner about the peasant life and landscape of Northern Sweden.

Emile Zola, along with fellow novelists Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert, was an early realist in French literature. In novels such as Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Zola's Nana, sex and violence were examined with vivid clarity. These realists soon adopted the word naturalism to describe their writings.

Leo Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists for such works as War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He also wrote a number of outstanding short stories. This is one of his best.

Holmes is confronted with the disappearance of the bride of a nobleman - just minutes after the ceremony. "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor" is one of the 56 original Sherlock Holmes stories and was first published in Strand Magazine in April 1892. It served as the (loose) basis for The Eligible Bachelor, a film starring Jeremy Brett as Holmes, Edward Hardwicke as Watson, and Simon Williams as Lord St. Simon.

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 near Dorchester in that part of England he called Wessex. With stories sometimes from his own imagination and sometimes from local tradition, Hardy's work, like Dickens and Trollope, creates a strong sense of mood and location. Hardy hoped to be remembered for his poetry, but ours is not a poetic age. Thus his claim to a new generation of readers rests on his prose. There are great similarities between his era, a time of challenge, and our own.

This is the original classic story of Bram Stoker's undead monster. It has influenced Western portrayals (including Buffy and Angel) of vampires and vampirism for nearly a century. Even after all this time, Bram Stoker's Dracula remains the undisputed masterpiece of horror writing.

A literary giant of the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson made lasting contributions to English literature as an essayist, moralist, poet, biographer, literary critic and editor. His philosophical novella Rasselas became so popular that it was translated into five languages. A new English edition was published every year and even today there are multiple print editions available.

Raskolnikov, a student in St. Petersburg, murders an old woman, a money-lender, to prove his theory that violence purifies the strong. But no sooner is the deed done than Raskolnikov begins to feel remorse. What follows is one of the greatest psychological studies in world literature.

First published in 1888 in France, this novel is usually considered Maupassant's best. It is a piercing study of jealousy and suspicion. Pierre and Jean are the sons of a retired Parisian jeweler, M. Roland, living at Le Havre. Pierre is a doctor, whose temperament is somewhat nervous and unsteady. Jean, the younger, has a placid nature and is a lawyer. Both love the widowed young Mme. Rosemilly, who seems to prefer Jean. When Jean inherits a fortune from M. Marechal...