Showing results by narrator "John Burlinson" in All Categories

“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad … “So begins this historical tale of romantic adventure. Andre-Louis Moreau is an orphan and cousin of the beloved Aline. He is raised by his godfather, the Lord of Gavrillac, and matures into an educated lawyer—while Aline sets her mind on marrying the rich but dishonorable Marquis de la Tour d’Azyr. But when Moreau’s closest friend is killed by the Marquis in a duel, Moreau vows vengeance. After publicly denouncing the aristocracy and stirring up the crowds, Moreau is forced to go into hiding.

While exploring the beach, four adventurous children make the acquaintance of a very odd creature: a sand fairy. When they have adapted to the brusque and forthright demeanor of the fairy, they discover that he has unusual powers, which he can be persuaded to demonstrate. As a result, the children enjoy many bizarre adventures, some of which are dangerous, but all of which are entertaining. Five Children and It is the first volume of a trilogy.

Crazy Horse was as much feared by tribal foes as he was honored by allies. His war record was unmatched by any of his peers, and his rout of Custer at the Little Bighorn reverberates through history. Yet so much about him is unknown or steeped in legend. Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life corrects older, idealized accounts - and draws on a greater variety of sources than other recent biographies - to expose the real Crazy Horse: not the brash Sioux warrior we have come to expect but a modest, reflective man whose courage was anchored in Lakota piety.

The Ring and the Book is a verse novel of sex, lies, and murder, authored by Robert Browning, and it is widely considered to be one of the greatest literary works of the 19th century. It’s a “true crime” story based on the proceedings of a Roman murder trial held in 1698. Each of the 12 books consists of a dramatic monologue in the voice of a different character involved in the tale.

R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) is a science-fiction drama that was first presented in Czech in 1921. It introduced the term "robot", which is derived from a Czech word meaning "worker," to international vocabulary. The action opens in a factory that has successfully produced thousands of robots, who are essentially mindless drones. An idealistic humanitarian activist launches a plan to imbue some of the robots with human traits. The robots which have been humanized then assume leadership over the other robots and seek to organize them in a revolution to take over the world.

Endymion is the largest work by John Keats and was composed between April and November 1817. It was published in April 1818, and the critical reception was almost universally hostile. The plot is built around the ancient Greek legend of Endymion, the young shepherd whose beauty was such that the goddess of the Moon entreated Zeus to cast him into a permanent sleep so that she could gaze on him without interruption. Keats expands this story into an epistle on beauty and love, and weaves into it elements from several other Greek legends.

The collection contains eight of Shakespeare’s best loved comedies. Each exhibits the vigour, humour, and optimism of the young master before he turned to the gloom and bitterness of the great tragedies.

This collection of articles on constitutional government was written by three of the most significant figures in the establishment of the United States as sovereign nation. Alexander Hamilton, one of the most influential of the Founding Fathers, was the author of 51 of the 85 articles. James Madison, who later served as the fourth president, contributed 29 articles. The remaining five articles were written by John Jay, who was active in a number of public positions, including chief justice, various cabinet posts under Washington and governor of New York.

This collection of 10 classic tales is very representative of Wharton's approach to story-telling - in the narrative, the venue becomes a character almost as much as do the people. Situations are presented in an elegantly understated way, and the overall effect is disturbing rather than blatantly horrific.

The notorious pirate Captain Flint is dead, and his great horde of stolen treasure lies lost, stashed and buried on an island far, far away. Jim Hawkins, the humble son of a country innkeeper, comes into possession of the only map to Flint's treasure and is soon swept away on a high seas adventure of treachery and survival.

As the first important, book-length academic study in English of four of Shakespeare's major tragedies—Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth—Bradley's work both influenced and enabled modern Shakespearean literary criticism even as it engaged with, and often rebutted, conventional Romantic and Victorian interpretations of the plays and their author. Bradley's achievement has been widely praised for its philosophical and psychological insights and has never been out of print.

In Specters of God, John D. Caputo returns to the original impulse of his work, the "mystical element" in things, here under the name of an "anxious apophatics," as distinct from an "edifying apophatics" anchored in unity with God. In dialogue with Schelling, a new turn for him and the lynchpin of this argument, Caputo addresses the nocturnal powers in being, the specters that haunt our being and bring us up short.

The Wild Duck (Vilanden) is a tragedy with comic episodes. Ibsen himself characterized the play as a tragicomedy. It depicts ordinary life realistically instead of romantically and sentimentally, a revolutionary concept in Ibsen's time. The play is now generally acknowledged as one of Ibsen's supreme accomplishments.

Harmonium was American poet Wallace Stevens's first book, published when he was 44 years old. It represents his complete poetic output up to that point in his life. It is now considered a masterpiece, one of the great contributions to literary Modernism. It is a mixture of pure, rational, philosophical thought, and imaginary nonsense-verse. It is striking in its diversity and includes some of Stevens' best known and most-loved poems.

Moby Dick, which has been considered the great American novel, was first published in 1851. For material, Melville drew on his experience on whaling ships between 1841 and 1844, the sinking of the whaling vessel Essex in 1820, and extensive perusal of literature on whaling and many other subjects.

A collection of Christmas radio plays by Mike Murphy: Six heartwarming tales celebrating the festive season performed by members of The Online Stage.

The little known first novella of Charlotte Bronte, The Green Dwarf is a story of adventure, subterfuge, romance, and danger. Lady Emily Charlesworth is awaiting the return of her lover, Leslie, who is a down-on-his luck artist. However, the dastardly, coldhearted Colonel Percy is also vying for her heart and will stop at nothing to make Emily his own.

This is final installment in Edith Nesbit's classic trilogy of time-traveling adventures by four enterprising children.

Euripides (c. 480-406 B.C.E.) is the author of eighteen extant plays and many more only surviving in fragments. He is the youngest of the three great Athenian tragedians with Aeschylus and Sophocles. Hippolytus, bastard son of Theseus and the Amazon Hippolyta, has sworn chaste allegiance to the goddess Artemis, thus severely offending the goddess Aphrodite by failing to revere her. Aphrodite swears revenge and promises that he will die before the day is done, taking with him Queen Phaedra, wife of Theseus.

This collection contains a mixture of stories about ghosts and contacts from spirits, some by celebrated authors, together with essays on psychical research. As Joseph French notes in the preface, even for the skeptic, tales of ghostly activity retain a distinct fascination. The widespread interest in psychic phenomena in the early twentieth century proved to be a significant stimulus to literary production.