Showing results for "Paul Adam" in Classics

In 17th-century Sicily, a clever valet named Mascarille tries to help his boss, Lélie, win the girl of his dreams – only to find that Lélie is a monumental dunce who ruins every one of his intricate schemes. Undaunted, Mascarille invents progressively wilder plots, only to see his best-laid plans go very awry in Molière’s The Bungler, translated by Richard Wilbur.

Daphne du Maurier was one of the 20th century’s most popular writers. Extraordinarily prolific, she produced a string of bestsellers, many of which were adapted as award-winning films. From romance and adventure yarns to psychological thrillers and supernatural tales, the breadth and imaginative variety of her storytelling continues to thrill us today. This bumper collection features her most famous works and some lesser-known gems, beginning with full-cast adaptations of seven of her much-loved novels.

"A Tale of Two Cities" is set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. With well over 200 million copies sold, it ranks among the most famous works in the history of fictional literature. The novel depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralized by the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the revolution, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats in the early years of the revolution.

Unjustly imprisoned for 18 years in the Bastille, Dr. Alexandre Manette is reunited with his daughter, Lucie, and safely transported from France to England. It would seem that they could take up the threads of their lives in peace. As fate would have it though, the pair are summoned to the Old Bailey to testify against a young Frenchman - Charles Darnay - falsely accused of treason. Strangely enough, Darnay bears an uncanny resemblance to another man in the courtroom, the dissolute lawyer's clerk Sydney Carton. It is a coincidence that saves Darnay from certain doom more than once.

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is a historical novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel tells the story of the French Doctor Manette, his 18-year-long imprisonment in the Bastille in Paris, and his release to life in London with his daughter, Lucie, whom he had never met; Lucie's marriage and the collision between her beloved husband and the people who caused her father's imprisonment; and Monsieur and Madame Defarge, sellers of wine in a poor suburb of Paris.

"New Eve and Old Adam" was written by D.H. Lawrence in 1912. The story is largely autobiographical, telling the simple tale of an argument between a husband and wife, reflecting the difficult time Lawrence and his new wife Frieda were having. What was the place of a woman to be in a modern marriage? Lawrence argued that it was the woman's place to submit or unhappiness would ensue, at it did in this story. The wife is unable to submit to her husband and the marriage disintegrates.

The Old Adam is a story set in lodgings in Croydon, and the incident may again be autobiographical, but the story examines for the first time in Lawrence’s writing the different and conflicting loves between men and women.

Liebe auf den ersten Blick war es weiß Gott nicht - so lässt sich der Beginn der Romanze zwischen Adam und Eva beschreiben, wenn wir uns nicht auf die Genesis, sondern auf die Tagebücher berufen, die Mark Twain (1835-1910) seinen biblischen Protagonisten in die Federn diktierte. Mit ebenso humor- wie liebevoller Nachsicht verhandelt der Autor hier die keineswegs paradiesischen Unzulänglichkeiten der Geschlechter am Beispiel des ersten Traumpaars der Geschichte.