Showing results by publisher "The Copyright Group" in Literature & Fiction

My Lives and Loves Volume 2 covers Frank Harris's friendship and encounters with the Prince of Wales, Oscar Wilde, Guy De Maupassant, Lord Randolph Churchill, William Parnell and others. He sets the Evening News on its feet and comes to know the minds of Shakespeare and Goethe and the bodies of Elaine and Laura. He comes to realize the virtue of chastity and that it must be practiced - at least from time to time.

Born in 1857 in Poland, Joseph Conrad became a British citizen just before he turned 30. In the intervening years he lost both parents, becoming an orphan at 11, being thereafter raised by an uncle, who let the boy go to Marseille, where he began to work on merchant ships. At age 36 his life turned from one of ships to one of literary pursuit. Conrad brought to English literature both a fresh layer of style and a deeper examination of the human psyche in a wealth of works. In this audiobook we dwell among his numerous short stories.

The Forsyte Saga initially centres on Soames Forsyte - a successful solicitor living in London with his beautiful wife Irene. A pillar of the late Victorian upper middle class, materially wealthy, his appears to be a golden existence endowed with all the necessary possessions for a 'Man of Property' but beneath this very proper exterior lies a core of unhappiness and brutal relationships. When The Forsyte Saga was shown on television in 1967 it was hugely successful.

Most famous for his tales of crime and deduction, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle also had a passion for suspense, the supernatural, and the macabre, as demonstrated in this collection of gothic short stories. This set contains the stories 'The New Catacomb', 'Playing with Fire', 'The Terror of Blue John Gap', 'The Case of Lady Sannox', 'The Brown Hand', and 'The Los Amigos Fiasco'. So get ready for Doyle’s vivid, spine-tingling imagination to unnerve and thrill you in equal measure!

CHARLES DICKENS enjoyed entertaining his friends with readings of ghost stories, especially at Christmas time. In his classic tale The Signalman, the then high technology world of steam railway comes to contact with what looks like a good old fashioned haunting. A night at a desolate country inn dramatically changes Tom Smart's fortunes in The Bagman's Story. Together with Christmas Ghosts and Mr Testator’s Visitation, these tales are fine examples of Dickens’s spine-chilling talents.

Based in a mining village in Wales at the turn of the 19th century, How Green Was My Valley catches the impossible dilemmas that were created in society's irreversible shift from pastoral to industrial through Huw, the youngest son of seven. Loyalty, education, economics and manhood are examined in this pre union tightly knit mining community. Sentimentalised with lots of atmosphere this is a moving account of an important chapter in British history that affects every corner of the world.

This is the best known work of this Austrian writer and poet who based this tale of love, humiliation and obsession largely on his own life and gave the English language the word masochism. A compelling well written story it has inspired and influenced many psychologists, artists, writers and musicians from Thomas Mann to the Velvet Underground and even Freud, since its first publication in 1870.

Most famous for his tales of crime and deduction, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle also had a passion for suspense, the supernatural and the macabre as demonstrated in this collection of gothic short stories. This set contains the stories: The Horror of the Heights, The Lord of Chateau Noir, The Nightmare Room, The Ring of Thoth & The Brazilian Cat. So get ready for Doyle’s vivid spine tingling imagination to unnerve and thrill you in equal measure!

This book comes with an introduction and notes by Owen Knowles, University of Hull. Thackeray's upper-class Regency world is a noisy and jostling commercial fairground, predominantly driven by acquisitive greed and soulless materialism, in which the narrator himself plays a brilliantly versatile role as a serio-comic observer. Although subtitled 'A Novel without a Hero', "Vanity Fair" follows the fortunes of two contrasting but inter-linked lives.

John Donne (1572 – 1631) was an English poet, preacher, and a major representative of the metaphysical poets of the period. His works are notable for their realistic and sensual style and include sonnets, love poetry, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires, and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor, especially as compared to those of his contemporaries.

When we think of Oscar Wilde we think of his wonderful wit and of course his plays and short stories. We rarely think of his poetry. We should. His work brings new insights into both his view of the world and how we can view him.

The Marquis De Sade completed the first draft of Justine Volume 1, a powerful and compelling descent into the realms of sexual perversity and sado masochism, during two weeks in 1787 while a prisoner in the Bastille. Sexual degradation, humiliation and erotic pain are eloquently and openly explored in a novel that was to become the most famous and infamous of all de Sade's work.

David Storey's This Sporting Life, set in the industrial north, brilliantly conveys 21-year-old steelworker Arthur Machin's love of his rugby league, his success on the field, and his feelings towards his widowed landlady, as well as his bouts of doubt and anxiety.

Across north-eastern America the armies of Britain and France struggle for ascendancy. Their conflict, however, overlays older struggles between nations of Native Americans for possession of the same lands and between the native peoples and white colonisers. Through these layers of conflict Cooper threads a thrilling narrative, in which Cora and Alice Munro, daughters of a British commander on the front line of the colonial war, attempt to join their father.

Perhaps England's greatest literary family. To find one brilliant novelist in a family is extremely rare. But two? Three?

The Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily Jane and Anne, together with their brother Patrick, are famed throughout the world. And amongst their many talents was poetry. Of course, being Brontë's, they were rather good at that too.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is among the greatest American writers of fantasy and the supernatural. Born in 1890, a native of Providence, Rhode Island, his health was uncertain from childhood and he led a sheltered early life. His semi-invalidism enabled him to read omnivorously, and as a shy imaginative child he began to invent what would in his adult life become a whole macabre fantastic world of his own, peopled by creatures out of his own weird imagination.

Edmond Dantès, an innocent young sailor, falls into despair when he is arrested on a false charge of treason and thrown into prison without a trial. He learns of his friends' betrayal from the Abbé Faria, an equally innocent prisoner, and plots his revenge following a daring, if nightmarish escape from the Chateau d'If. After becoming a wealthy man, he assumes the guise of the urbane Count of Monte-Cristo and begins to entrap his enemies one by one.

Tropic of Cancer is regarded as a masterpiece, with Time magazine rating it as one of the 100 most important novels of the 20th century. It is an unforgettable, confessional, warts and all novel of the author and his friends riotous adventures in Paris during the Depression. It changed censorship laws in the US where it was published decades after it was written, and reading it today amplifies the debt that modern writers owe Miller.

Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck.

Edith Nesbit is more famously known as a writer of children’s stories such as The Railway Children. But in this volume we explore her short stories of the macabre and ghostly sort. Thought of as the first modern writer for children she also wrote for adults producing over 50 books in total as well as collections of poetry which we shall explore in a separate volume. These stories are brought to your ears in eerie detail by Ghizela Rowe and Richard Mitchley.