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Audiobooks Narrated by Steven Smith
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This Audiobook contains the following works :
The Castle of Otranto - Horace Walpole
The Damned (Là-bas) - Joris-Karl Huysmans
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - Washington Irving
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
The Dunwich Horror - H.P Lovecraft
The Masque of the Red Death - Edgar Allan Poe
The Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux
In American Notes, Rudyard Kipling, the Nobel Prize-winning author of the Jungle Book, visits the USA. As the travel-diary of an Anglo-Indian Imperialist visiting the USA, these American Notes offer an interesting view of America in the 1880s.
Kipling affects a wide-eyed innocence, and expresses astonishment at features of American life that differ from his own, not least the freedom (and attraction) of American women. However, he scorns the political machines that made a mockery of American democracy, and while exhibiting the racist attitudes that made him controversial in the 20th century concludes 'It is not good to be a negro in the land of the free and the home of the brave.'
G. A. England of Harvard University (letter to The New York Times 10/11/1902) wrote: 'To the American temperament, the gentleman who throws stones while himself living in a glass house cannot fail to be amusing; the more so if, as in Mr Kipling's case, he appears to be in a state of maiden innocence regarding the structure of his own domicile.'
G. K. Chesterton was a great admirer of Charles Dickens, and wrote a noted critique of Dickens' works expressing his opinion in his own inimitable style
CONTAINS
CHAPTER I.—THE DICKENS PERIOD
CHAPTER II.—THE BOYHOOD OF DICKENS
CHAPTER III.—THE YOUTH OF DICKENS
CHAPTER IV.—'THE PICKWICK PAPERS'
CHAPTER V.—THE GREAT POPULARITY
CHAPTER VI.—DICKENS AND AMERICA PART TWO
CHAPTER VII.—DICKENS AND CHRISTMAS
CHAPTER VIII.—THE TIME OF TRANSITION
CHAPTER IX.—LATER LIFE AND WORKS
CHAPTER X.—THE GREAT DICKENS CHARACTERS
CHAPTER XI.—ON THE ALLEGED OPTIMISM OF DICKENS
CHAPTER XII.—A NOTE ON THE FUTURE OF DICKENS
The audiobook traces in some detail Shaw's work as a critic (puritanical opposition to Shakespeare) and as a dramatist. G K Chesterton was ideally placed to write this critical biography of the literary works and political views of George Bernard Shaw. He was a personal friend and yet an ardent opponent of Shaw's progressive socialism. The lightness of tone and the humour of his other works are equally present in his examination of Shaw. The book presents a perceptive and far from dated critique of Shaw's philosophy and politics and through them the emerging progressive orthodoxy of the 20 century. The book represents an excellent introduction to Shaw's work and the spirit of the age in which they were created.
G.K. Chesterton's first publication, 'Greybeards at Play' is a collection of poetry and accompanying illustrations. The work is marked by the irreverent whimsy and ancient delight that would eventually be recognized as Chesterton's signature style. Short (only four poems long and a dedication), playful, and with a touch of awe, Chesterton's first piece (written at 26) is appropriately titled: it is the work of an amateur, mature in his spirit, young in his play
Written at the defining moment when Ireland was heading toward complete national independence, Chesterton's study of the Irish question demonstrates that if both the English and the Irish had modified their attitudes slightly, subsequent Anglo-Irish relations could have been radically improved. Unlike most historians, he tackles the question from an ideological, philosophical, and religious standpoint. As a Roman Catholic and a lover of English nationalism, Chesterton shared many sentiments with the Irish. Written objectively and frankly, this is an important work for any student of English/Irish history as well as an excellent study of the effects of ideology and religion on society.
Horatio Herbert Kitchener was Irish by birth but English by extraction, being born in County Kerry, the son of an English colonel. The fanciful might see in this first and accidental fact the presence of this simple and practical man amid the more mystical western problems and dreams which were very distant from his mind, an element which clings to all his career and gives it an unconscious poetry. He had many qualities of the epic hero, and especially this -- that he was the last man in the world to be the epic poet. There is something almost provocative to superstition in the way in which he stands at every turn as the symbol of the special trials and the modern transfiguration of England; from this moment when he was born among the peasants of Ireland to the moment when he died upon the sea, seeking at the other end of the world the other great peasant civilisation of Russia. Yet at each of these symbolic moments he is, if not as unconscious as a symbol, then as silent as a symbol; he is speechless and supremely significant, like an ensign or a flag. The superficial picturesqueness of his life, at least, lies very much in this -- that he was like a hero condemned by fate to act an allegory
Published in 1866, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War is a collection of poems about the Civil War by Herman Melville. Many of the poems are inspired by second- and third-hand accounts from print news sources (especially the Rebellion Record) and from family and friends. A handful of trips Melville took before, during, and after the war provide additional angles of vision into the battles, the personalities, and the moods of war. In an opening note, Melville describes his project not so much as a systematic chronicle (though many of the individual poems refer to specific events) but as a kind of memory piece of national experience. The 'aspects' to which he refers in the title are as diverse as 'the moods of involuntary meditation—moods variable, and at times widely at variance.' Much of the verse is stylistically conventional (more so than modern readers perhaps expect from the author of Moby-Dick), but the shifting subjectivities and unresolved traumas that unfold in the collection merit repeated contemplation. Melville's Battle-Pieces do not offer a neatly versified narrative of the Civil War but rather kaleidescopic glimpses of shifting emotions and ambivalent reflections of post-war America
'Second, when telling such lies as may seem necessary to your international standing, do not tell the lies to the people who know the truth. Do not tell the Eskimos that snow is bright green; nor tell the negroes in Africa that the sun never shines in that Dark Continent. Rather tell the Eskimos that the sun never shines in Africa; and then, turning to the tropical Africans, see if they will believe that snow is green. Similarly, the course indicated for you is to slander the Russians to the English and the English to the Russians; and there are hundreds of good old reliable slanders which can still be used against both of them. There are probably still Russians who believe that every English gentleman puts a rope round his wife's neck and sells her in Smithfield. There are certainly still Englishmen who believe that every Russian gentleman takes a rope to his wife's back and whips her every day. But these stories, picturesque and useful as they are, have a limit to their use like everything else; and the limit consists in the fact that they are not true, and that there necessarily exists a group of persons who know they are not true. It is so with matters of fact about which you asseverate so positively to us, as if they were matters of opinion.
In this dark and compelling short novel, Fyodor Dostoevsky tells the story of Alexey Ivanovitch, a young tutor working in the household of an imperious Russian general. Alexey tries to break through the wall of the established order in Russia, but instead becomes mired in the endless downward spiral of betting and loss. His intense and inescapable addiction is accentuated by his affair with the General's cruel yet seductively adept niece, Polina. In The Gambler, Dostoevsky reaches the heights of drama with this stunning psychological portrait
The Lifestyle of A Gay Hustler in a Straight World, fully details the life of Steven Smith. Steven went through turmoil at an early age, being raped by a family member, exposed to a life of hustling, trying to find love, and praying to GOD for help along the way. Steven thought this was all he had until his life was turned around for the better. He went through hell and back and never gave up on who he really was. The men in and out of his life were only a preview of what was to really come.
While the novel is humorous (one instance has the King sitting on top of an omnibus and speaking to it as to a horse: 'Forward, my beauty, my Arab,' he said, patting the omnibus encouragingly, 'fleetest of all thy bounding tribe'), it is also an adventure story: Chesterton is not afraid to let blood be drawn in his battles, fought with sword and halberd in the London streets, and Wayne thinks up a few ingenious strategies; and, finally, the novel is philosophical, considering the value of one man's actions and the virtue of respect for one's enemies.
