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The Irish have always had a knack for telling wonderful stories, and their fantastic ability has been recognized from early Gaelic times. For centuries, stories of all kinds have been offered to friends and strangers alike as a form of entertainment and communication. Today in Ireland, the short story is revered even above the novel. Hearing these magnificent stories, we become aware of more than just the humor and travail of a small island.

Virgil's Georgics ranks as one of the most precious pastoral poems ever written, and it has served as a model for its type ever since. Georgics means "of or relating to agriculture or rural life" and it comes from the Greek word, "georgicus". Virgil's main theme in this, his second great work after The Eclogues, was the importance of peace both in the spiritual and physical sense.

The moral cesspool that Rome had become in the first century AD is the subject of The Satyricon by Petronius. The work itself was originally quite a long one, perhaps as long as a thousand pages. The extant portion, however, is only a small fraction of the original. The work contains a mixture of prose and verse, serious and comic elements, and erotic and decadent passages. It possesses a sophisticated humor and a very ironic tone. It is the creation of a Roman gentleman whose insights were keen.

Acerbic wit and stinging satire are contrasted with delicate sensibility and passionate desire in the work of the Latin poet Catullus. Armed with an urbane sophistication and an aristocratic circle of friends, Catullus moved about easily in the upper ranks of Roman society and was acquainted with Cicero, Caesar, and Pompey among others.

Winner of the 2003 Audie Award for Classic Fiction, this is an unparalleled presentation of Maugham's stories, complete with sound effects and music.

The Wind in the Willows is a pastoral fantasy by Scottish writer Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. By turns slow moving and fast paced, it focuses on four anthropomorphised animals: Mole, Rat, Toad, and Badger. They live in a rural version of Edwardian England. The novel is notable for its mixture of mysticism, adventure, morality, and camaraderie. It is universally celebrated for its charming evocation of the Thames Valley countryside.

This is the story of Margaret Hale, a young English woman who accompanies her family's move from rural southern England to the industrial north. It proves to be a difficult change, with all the attendant social conflicts and cultural misunderstandings consequent to such situations. It is a study in contrasts. Mrs. Gaskell created one of the Victorian era's greatest heroines in Margaret Hale, a young lady of passionate intensity.

German short stories began in the late 18th century as brief, beautifully written moral fables. In the following century, style evolved toward realism in parallel with that of other European literature. From the lofty idealism of Goethe to the searing verisimilitude of Mann, German writers of all styles have left us some of the most arresting profiles of the human condition ever conceived.

Ancient Constantinople, the glorious capital of the Eastern Roman Empire for over 1,000 years, and the jewel of Christendom, is the setting for this incredible historical novel. No other city in the world could compare with it in grandeur, splendor, and wealth. And when it fell to the Turks in 1453, it must have seemed like the end of the world to Christians. Famed author Mika Waltari takes us into the last months of this dying city as revealed in the diary of John Angelos, a strange man hopelessly in love with the daughter of an eminent Byzantine official.

Ferdinand Lot (1866-1952) was one of the great historians of his generation, and the transition from Roman to Medieval civilization was a process that fascinated him most of his life. Rather than placing the emphasis for Rome’s fall on purely political or military reasons, Lot put forth multiple explanations for the birth of the Middle Ages which embrace not only politics and war, but linguistic, geographic, cultural, social and economic factors.

Roanoke Hundred is an historical novel about the very first attempt to found an English colony in North America in 1585. Although it is a fictional account, the story is based on the letters, diaries, and archives of the period. Every character is based on a real person. The entire adventure centers around one of England’s greatest heroes, Sir Richard Grenville. Grenville was lord of the manors of Stowe, Kilkhampton in Cornwall, and of Bideford in Devon. He was also a soldier, an armed merchant fleet owner, privateer, colonizer, and explorer.

Trying to squeeze an entire history of Chinese civilization into a brief, one volume account is a formidable task, but one that has succeeded brilliantly here. Hilda Hookham has provided us with a concise story that, while not getting too entangled with personalities and cultural issues, manages to navigate the swirling passage of events that comprise over 3,000 years of Chinese political history.

The spirit of Christmas has never been captured better than by Charles Dickens' masterpiece about Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit and all those wonderful spirits, especially the ghost of Jacob Marley. It can be fairly stated that Dickens was so successful with A Christmas Carol, that his characters have become more well known than the title itself.

Widely considered the greatest of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, The Hound of the Baskervilles was originally serialized in The Strand Magazine from August 1901 to April 1902. It is the third of only four short novels Doyle wrote about his super sleuth. Set largely on Dartmoor in Devon in England's West Country, it is the gloom-enshrouded story of murder inspired by the family legend of a gigantic, demonic hound of supernatural origin.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, (1860-1904), was born in Russia at Taganrog on the Sea of Azov. His name has become synonymous with a certain literary style much admired and widely copied since his death. Typically, a Chekhov story is a "mood", a state of mind, usually with regard to relations between one person and another. Under the influence of the constant, infinitesimal, and unforeseen pinpricks of life, there occurs a gradual transformation of that state of mind.

Guy de Maupassant, (1850 - 1893), a native of Normandy, wrote in a bold and vigorous style that moves inexorably along clear plot lines. He had an astonishing capacity for creating believable characters, and he wasted little ink in putting his stories in motion. Maupassant was a master of "le mot juste," waiting until the perfect word came to him before setting his thoughts to paper. He was one of the first truly modern writers, and today his stories still resonate with enthusiasm and originality.

A Short History of the Middle Ages describes the tumultuous era that bridged antiquity and the modern world. Renowned 19th-century French historian and statesman Victor Duruy originally crafted a sweeping, multi-volume chronicle of this pivotal period, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the dawn of the Renaissance.

That it required a horrible war to motivate Wilfred Owen to write some of the 20th century's best poetry is symbolic of that great calamity. In a vivid, languorous, mesmerizing style, Owen has left humanity the language of loss. When the Great War broke out in 1914, Owen, along with millions of his compatriots, were drawn into the maw of the world's first mechanized war.

The French Revolution in San Domingo by Lothrop Stoddard is a captivating and meticulously researched classic that vividly chronicles the dramatic, horrifying chaos of France's richest colony during the revolutionary pandemonium of the 1790s. Once known as San Domingue (Santo Domingo), the prosperous French-speaking portion of the island eventually became the independent nation of Haiti at the end of the revolutionary period.

Chinese literature offers the most satisfying glimpse into the mysterious and beautiful civilization of China of any of the means at our disposal. But we discover in its pages the same human conditions which color our own cultures today. Love, revenge, betrayal, honor...they all bring our humanity into sharper focus, cutting through the confusion of nationality and time to draw us closer together with a celebration of our own similarities.