Showing results by narrator "Ron Altman" in All Categories

In this typically gloomy novella, Andreyev explores the stunning finality of death and the futility of regret.

Stephen Leacock (1869 - 1944) is considered by many to be the Canadian counterpart to the better known American humorists Mark Twain and S.J. Perelman. In the early 20th century he was one of the most widely read authors in the English speaking world. Jack Benny and Groucho Marx considered Leacock as one of the funniest writers they had ever read. The following sketches have been adapted from pieces in the miscellanies Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy and Further Foolishness, in which Leacock satirizes many of the social institutions of his time.

Young Edward Temple, at the age of eight, is afflicted with an ailment that threatens him with permanent blindness. A course of treatment is recommended whereby the boy is kept in a darkened chamber and his eyes, bandaged. To keep Edward's spirits up, his father decides to relate to him the inspiring life stories of six historical personages.

This play forms part of a tetralogy which focuses on one of Wedekind's obsessive themes: the destructive interplay between primal sexual urges and social convention. Each play revolves around a powerful young female character, who has the power to control and captivate men, but who in turn is destroyed by the exercise of that power. In Castle Wetterstein, that role is represented by Effie, the young daughter of a bourgeois widow, who is being courted by the man who killed her late husband in a duel.

Devil Stories - Twenty tales of the demonic selected and edited by Maximilian J. Rudwin. The Devil is an old character in literature. Perhaps he is as old as literature itself. He is encountered in the story of the paradisiacal sojourn of our first ancestors, and from that day on, Satan has appeared unfailingly, in various forms and with various functions, in all the literatures of the world.

Santa is in trouble - he catches a cold at the most inconvenient time of the year. As he rests in bed, he ponders anxiously: Who will deliver the presents this year?

Interplanetary visitor Moop has been sent on a mission: to investigate Christmas. When he meets Santa, Moop discovers that there is rather more to Earth's greatest festival than he had expected.