Showing results by author "Joseph Conrad" in All Categories

Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be "a simple tale" proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats, and London's fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations.

Lord Jim is considered by many to be one of the greatest novels published in the 20th century. At its core, Lord Jim is a story of conscience and what can happen if one forgets one's honor and turns one's back on one's fellow man.

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 Secret Agent is a Victorian terrorist tale that has found a new audience with today's audiences. Set in 1866 London, this book tells the story of Adolf Verloc, a shopkeeper turned anarchist.

An unsettling tale of plague, drift and terror, The Shadow-Line documents a young seaman’s coming of age after he is recruited to captain a ship for the first time. Bad luck and disease haunt the inexperienced hero and his crew, and the evil legacy of the previous captain overshadows them with a feeling of supernatural menace.

Country doctor Kennedy tells the story of Amy Foster, a tender-hearted country girl, who alone takes pity on a starving and bewildered foreign castaway, feared and shunned by the rest of her community. The castaway proves to be amiable and intelligent, but this is not enough to overcome the prejudice aroused by his alienness.

When the new captain takes over command of his first ship for the homeward voyage from the Gulf of Siam, he surprises his crew by taking the first nightwatch himself. While alone on deck he is surprised to find a lone swimmer in the sea who comes on board. The stranger is a murderer escaping justice, but is also eerily an almost exact doppelganger of the captain himself. Not only does he look identical, but the two almost seem to share the same thoughts and secrets. Rather than turn his fugitive-double over to the authorities, the captain hides him in his own cabin.

First published in 1902, Heart of Darkness has clearly earned its place in literary history. The story is based on Conrad’s personal experiences in Central Africa and closely parallels many of the events that occurred while he worked his way up the Congo River, and back, on a steam wheeler. Those events inspired him to create characters and a story line that deals with the early greedy exploitation of the Congo by the Europeans, in this case, through the ivory trade.

The story of the enigmatic Kurtz and his outpost in deepest Congo as told by Marlow is an adventure story that examines the intent and effects of colonization. It remains one of the most controversial and profound writings of world literature.

This is the novel Typhoon. Written for you by Joseph Conrad, and read by Jim Edmark.

A wonderful anthology of fifteen of the great classic Novellas. 1. Immensee by Theodor Storm 2. The Jew's Beech Tree by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff 3. The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad 4. The Withered Arm by Thomas Hardy 5. Mad Monkton by Wilkie Collins 6. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson 7. The Lifted Veil by George Eliot 8. England my England by D. H. Lawrence

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness tells a story based on Conrad's own experiences in the Congo Free State during the 1890s. Set in Africa, the main character, Marlow, is asked to find and bring back the ivory trader, Mr. Kurtz. However, the deeper Marlow travels, the more ominous and depressing his surroundings become.

Award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti reads this Joseph Conrad classic tale of two white traders, Carlier and Kayerts, comical and pathetic, who move from polite society to the Congo, where they hope to become wealthy on the "Dark Continent" by spreading commerce and civilization to black Africa. But as was often the case, the longer they are away from civilization, the more the refinements of civilization slip away, along with their sanity.

The story centers on Charles Marlow, who narrates most of the book. He is an Englishman who takes a foreign assignment from a Belgian trading company as a river-boat captain in Africa. Heart of Darkness exposes the dark side of European colonization while exploring the three levels of darkness that the protagonist, Marlow, encounters: the darkness of the Congo wilderness, the darkness of the Europeans' cruel treatment of the African natives, and the unfathomable darkness within every human being for committing heinous acts of evil.

In fading light on the Thames Estuary near London, as Charles Marlow and his companions relax on deck, waiting for the turn of the tide, he tells of the time he turned ‘freshwater sailor’ on the River Congo. His perilous journey upriver in a little steamboat with a band of white colonialists and a group of cannibals takes him closer to the coveted ivory, closer to Kurtz the rogue agent, closer to certain unspeakable rites and the heart of darkness.

In Nostromo, Joseph Conrad has transformed an apocryphal anecdote about a sailor who got away with stealing a boat loaded with silver into a grandly panoramic, yet deeply unsettling, narrative that sees every conceivable type of political person — from the laughably oafish and brutal to various shades of the well-meaning — caught up in an episode of revolutionary upheaval in the fictional South American country of Costaguana.

Adolf Verloc is a secret agent who provides information and takes care of arriving undercover agents of an un-named government through their embassy. He also runs a shady business selling pornography, comic books, contraceptives, and the like. As well as this, he’s a confidential informant to Chief Inspector Heat of the London police. His family consists of his wife, Winnie, her Mother, and his (presumably) autistic brother-in-law, Stevie.

Jim goes to sea full of dreams of heroism and boyish adventure. But, under pressure, his own conduct falls far below the ideal he has set himself. Condemned even more by himself than by his fellow men, Jim leaves the world and seeks his redemption in the remote forests of Patusan. It is there he finds fame, love, and success. It is there also that he faces the final and biggest test of his courage and faith, and comes through it in tragic triumph.

FNH Audio presents an unabridged reading of this classic tale. Charles Marlow sits with is friends upon the Thames and tells the story of his time when he followed a similar watercourse up into the depths of Africa. That trip was intended for the relief of the mysterious Mr Kurtz, a man powerful and frightening. In the dark jungle the truth of mankind’s depravity is to be discovered, the very heart of darkness.

In these four stories, written between 1900 and 1902, Joseph Conrad bid gradual farewell to his adventurous life at sea and began to confront the more daunting complexities of life on land in the twentieth century. In 'Typhoon' Conrad reveals, in the steadfast courage of an undemonstrative captain and the imaginative readiness of his young first mate, the differences between instinct and intelligence in a partnership vital to human survival.