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Audiobooks Narrated by Frederick Davidson
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"This fictional classic describes the factual persecution endured by the early Christians living in the catacombs beneath Rome through the character of Marellus, a captain in the Praetorian Guard and despised Christian. Penned by an anonymous nineteenth-century author, Martyr of the Catacombs has challenged and encouraged the faithful for over a hundred years."
"Penguin Island is Anatole France's most searching and satirical novel. A humorous critique of customs and laws, rituals and rites, its subject is human nature, but its characters are penguins in the mythical land of Penguinia. The story of the strutting penguins and their virtues and vices is not merely a burlesque allegory of French history, but a satire of the history of mankind. With gentle yet biting irony, France challenges the Spencerian belief in the ultimate perfectibility of man, though his irony reveals his sympathy for man's weaknesses and his need for social institutions.
First published in 1908, Penguin Island is widely regarded as Anatole France's masterpiece."
"In 1904, Great Britain was at the height of its prosperity; but G. K. Chesterton saw the drudgery of capitalism and bureaucracy eating away at the eccentricity and spontaneity of the human spirit. In The Napoleon of Notting Hill, his first novel, Chesterton creates a witty satire of staid government, set in a London of the future.
Auberon Quin, a common clerk who looks like a cross between a baby and an owl and is often seen standing on his head, is one day told that he has been randomly selected to be His Majesty the King. He decides to turn London into a medieval carnival for his own amusement—with delightful results."
"They are icons of the literary world whose soaring works have been discussed and analyzed in countless classrooms, homes, and pubs. Yet for most readers, the living, breathing human beings behind the classics have remained unknown—until now. In this utterly captivating book, Dr. Elliot Engel, a leading authority on the lives of great authors, illuminates the fascinating and flawed members of literature’s elite. In lieu of stuffy biographical sketches, Engel provides fascinating anecdotes.
You’ll never look at these literary giants the same way again."
"The Trespasser, D. H. Lawrence's second novel, foreshadowed the passion of Lady Chatterley's Lover.
Helena Verden, a young woman in her late twenties, and Siegmund MacNair, her violin teacher, are in love. But there is more than one obstacle on their road to happiness. Siegmund is a married man with children, and Helena is full of inhibitions. They spend a week together on the Isle of Wight, their passion remaining unrequited. When they return to London, Siegmund faces a deadlock. Tormented by his family's bitter reproaches, he is nonetheless unable to desert them for Helena. His solution to his dilemma turns a woman's longing for love into tragedy.
Lawrence based his novel on the true-life experiences of his friend Helen Corke, as revealed in her diaries."
"E. M. Forster's first novel explores the comic and tragic effects of culture clash between insular, provincial British personalities and sensual Italian culture and atmosphere.
Lilia Herriton, an impulsive thirty-three-year-old widow from London, travels to Tuscany, where she falls in love with both Italy and the handsome, carefree Gino Carella, a dentist's son twelve years her junior. When news reaches the snobbish Herriton family that Lilia intends to marry again, this time to an unsuitable Italian, the domineering Mrs. Herriton sends her son, Philip, to prevent the catastrophe—but he arrives too late.
When tragedy strikes, the Herriton family decides to bring Lilia's infant son to England to be brought up properly—but not everyone is satisfied with the situation."
"Although it is little known in this country, The Belly of Paris is considered one of Émile Zola's best novels. Set in the newly built food markets of Paris, it is a story of wealth and poverty set against a sumptuous banquet of food and commerce.
Having just escaped from prison after being wrongfully accused, young Florent arrives at Paris' food market, Les Halles, half starved, surrounded by all he can't have, and indignant at his world, which he now knows to be unjust. He finds that the city's working classes have been displaced to make way for bigger streets and bourgeois living quarters, so he settles in with his brother's family. Gradually, he takes up with the local socialists, who are more at home in bars than on the revolutionary streets. Slowly, the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor drags the city to the breaking point."
"He was a gossip columnist’s dream. Piccadilly Jim’s life was a collage of broken promises and drunken brawls.
And Jim’s straight-laced Victorian aunt was not amused. So, she decided to reform him. Unfortunately, her reform project started at a time when Jim had fallen in love and had already decided to reform himself. Thus, life became complicated.
Jim pretends to be himself—a beautiful display of Wodehousean logic; hilarious indeed!"
"Three young truants from a church meeting on Sunday make their way to a seashore hideaway, where they observe a huge black man muttering incantations and performing weird rites. When the man discovers the children, he chases them with a knife. In defense, Davy Crawfurd flings a rock at him, and they narrowly escape.
Years later, young David Crawfurd goes to South Africa to make his fortune and is caught in the very heart of a great native uprising. Under strange circumstances, he comes face-to-face with its leader, only to recognize the strange blazing eyes of the black man he had encountered as a child on the beach. How David makes his fortune more quickly and more perilously than he had expected is told in this thrilling tale of adventure."
"The history of China is as rich and strange as that of any country on earth. Yet for many, China's history remains unknown, or known only through the stylized images that generations in the West have cherished or reviled as truth.
With his command of character and event--the product of thirty years of research and reflection in the field--Spence dispels those myths in a powerful narrative. Over four centuries of Chinese history, from the waning days of the once-glorious Ming Dynasty to Deng Xiaoping's bloody suppression of the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, Spence fashions the astonishing story of the effort to achieve a modern China. Through the ideas and emotions of its reformist Confucian scholars, its poets, novelists, artists, and visionary students, we see one of the world's oldest cultures struggling to define itself as Chinese and modern."
"“Dr. Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered, “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound.”
The “luminous, ghostly, and spectral” hound of family legend has been seen roaming the moors at night. Sir Charles Baskerville has recently died, and it appears that the new baronet, Sir Henry, has inherited not only the vast wealth and property of his family but also a terrible destiny. To this Holmes ominously observes, “It’s an ugly business, Watson, an ugly dangerous business and the more I see of it the less I like it.”"
"Dr. Johnson may have been correct in saying that 'Rousseau was a very bad man,' but none can argue that his ideas are among the most influential in all of world history. It was Rousseau, the father of the romantic movement, who was responsible for introducing at least two modern day thoughts that pervade academia: (1) free expression of the creative spirit is more important than strict adhesion to formal rules and traditional procedures, and (2) man is innately good but is corrupted by society and civilization.
The Confessionsis Rousseau's landmark autobiography. Both brilliant and flawed, it is nonetheless beautifully written and remains one of the most moving human documents in all of literature. In this work, Rousseau 'frankly and sincerely' settles accounts with himself in an effort to project his 'true' image to the world. In so doing he reveals the details of a man who paid little regard to accepted morality and social conventions."
