Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Classics

Mark Twain is a master of adventure, mystery, and wit. This collection, containing three tales of mystery, offers a healthy dose of each—and more! In "Tom Sawyer, Detective", a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Tom Sawyer Abroad, take a ride down the Mississippi to Uncle Silas’ farm. Mark Twain’s satirical take on the immensely popular detective novels of the time provides enough twists and turns to satisfy any avid mystery fan.

Claude Wheeler resembles the youngest son of an American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It is only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds what he has been searching for all his life.

This short novel follows the fate of Sissy Jupe, a warm-hearted circus child, and the family that adopts her. Deserted by her ailing father, Sissy is taken into the cold household of the Gradgrind family, which operates a school. The "eminently practical" Thomas Gradgrind believes only in facts and figures and has raised his children accordingly, thoroughly suppressing the imaginative side of their nature, and the consequences are devastating.

The House of Mirth was Edith Wharton's first great novel. Set among the elegant brownstones of New York City and opulent country houses like gracious Bellomont on the Hudson, the novel creates a satiric portrayal of what Wharton herself called "a society of irresponsible pleasure-seekers" with a precision comparable to that of Proust.

In 1897, at the age of 50, Bram Stoker was touring manager to the actor Henry Irving and was enjoying a modest success as a journalist and writer. Publication in that year of Dracula was to bring him international and lasting fame.

Plucky and romantic Alice tries to rise above the crudities of her hopelessly shabby background in this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic about ambition and self-delusion. The lower-middle class Adams family faces a slow disintegration in a small Midwestern town. Alice, a social climber, is ashamed of her unsuccessful family and determined to distinguish herself.

Robert Browning's intensely romantic love affair with Elizabeth Barrett inspired some of literature's most celebrated verse. His view that love is the key to the meaning of life and life's animating force is evident in these collected poems.

Torn by a quirk of fate from his life as a dilettante and intellectual, Humphrey van Weydon finds himself at the whim of the ruthless Wolf Larsen. The 2 men - the one youthful, idealistic, and upper-class, the other ruthless, dangerous, self-taught, and self-determined - inevitably become adversaries. As he does in Call of the Wild and White Fang, Jack London dramatizes in this story the violent encounter between safe, genteel comfort and a brutal set of circumstances.

First published in 1920, Flappers and Philosophers marked F. Scott Fitzgerald's entry into the realm of the short story, in which he adroitly proved himself "a master of the mechanism of short story technique" ( Boston Transcript).

In the setting of what is present-day Kazakhstan, Tolstoy examines two psychological problems. The first dilemma is that of a young man who desires both fulfilling love and a place as a respected member of society. The other is the difficulty of a primitive society to accept domination by a higher culture that has no understanding of the traditions it asks its colonists to cast aside.

Elizabeth Gaskell's comic portrait of early Victorian life in a country town describes with poignant wit the uneventful lives of its lady-like inhabitants, offering an ironic commentary on the separate spheres and diverse experiences of men and women. As the external world necessarily impinges even on Cranford, the unlikely juxtapositions of old and new brought about by the pace of change are also explored.

This anthology of unabridged short stories represents some of the most significant works from the most influential American authors of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Includes the following: "Rip Van Winkle" by Washington Irving, "Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe, "Mermaids" by Louisa May Alcott, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" by Mark Twain, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce, and "The Gift of the Magi" by O. Henry.

A Son of the Middle Border is an epic story of the quest for new frontiers during the last half of the nineteenth century, and of the gradual, heartbreaking failure of America's pioneer ideal.

One of the earliest novels in English, Moll Flanders is the purported autobiography of a heroine who is undoubtedly one of the most lively, convincing, and delightful rogues in literature. Born in Newgate Prison and orphaned soon after, Moll is provided with no opportunities in life, yet she is propelled by an unrelenting drive to overcome her background of impoverishment.

With his simulated day-by-day reportage, prize-winning journalist-historian Jeffrey St. John makes you an eyewitness to the 1787-1788 political battle to ratify the U.S. Constitution. And what a battle it was!

The story opens in the country parsonage of Dr. Primrose, a kindly man who has a good heart, a good family, and a good income. Suddenly, his idyllic life is cruelly devastated by a series of misfortunes, and he ends up in prison. Yet, despite all this calamity and injustice, the vicar never loses sight of Christian morality, a conviction which lends him genuine nobility and, in the end, also brings justice and the restoration of his family and fortune.

Would you be able to spend a million dollars in cash and leave yourself penniless if it meant you would then be given many more millions? That’s poor Monty Brewster’s dilemma in this charming tale.

Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of stories set in a fictitious town in the 1890s, has long been considered Sherwood Anderson's masterpiece. Haunting and powerful, it draws readers into the streets and houses of Winesburg - and into the darkly complex lives of each of Anderson's unforgettable "grotesques."

Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in a provincial town with a bizarre but seductive proposition for local landowners. He proposes to buy the names of their serfs who have died but who are still registered on the census, saving their owners from paying tax on them. But what collateral will Chichikov receive for these "souls"?

A witness to the coronation of Charles II, the Great Plague of 1665, and the Great Fire of 1666, Pepys chronicled the events of his day. His diary provides an astonishingly frank and diverting account of political intrigues, naval, church, and cultural affairs, as well as a quotidian journal of daily life in London during the Restoration.