61 Results for : slks
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Tales of Terror and Mystery , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 296min
Trapped by the strength of the public adoration of his character, Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle was desperate to write other works not involving the sleuth. The Tales of Terror and Mystery have all the recognisable qualities that made Conan Doyle's work so popular - the attention to gruesome detail, the meticulous logic and the intricate and wittily bemusing plotting - yet they are free of the constraints put on Conan Doyle by Mr. Holmes. These stories let loose the adventurous side of the rational and logical mind that many associate with Conan Doyle - the side that pulled him away from his medical studies as a young man to the Arctic Circle on a whaling ship - and, more importantly, the side that led him to a firm belief that grew throughout his life in the occult and the spiritual. His commitment to things psychic was so great that it is claimed he spent an estimated 258 pounds in the later years of his life on various occult causes. The pioneer fascinated by advances in the technology of flight is released in "The Horror of the Heights", with Conan Doyle’s hero subjected to the hitherto unknown terrors of the upper layers of the atmosphere. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: BIll Paterson. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/slks/000054/bk_slks_000054_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
- Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
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Lady Chatterley's Lover , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 785min
The story of Lady Chatterley and her love for her husband's gamekeeper outraged the sensibilities of Edwardian England. Lawrence had already been dismissed as a purveyor of the obscene for the attitudes to sex that he had shown in The Rainbow, which had been fiercely suppressed on its publication in 1915. Chatterley, written in several versions around 1928 in Italy in the final part of Lawrence's life, was a deliberate choice on the author's part to address sex head on, describe the act and its pleasures in detail and put forward his belief that mankind had lost touch with its pagan and natural roots, its link to the earth and therefore its strength. Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned from publication in Britain until 1960, when the radical new publishing house Penguin Books brought out a paperback edition and was immediately taken to court for obscenity. The trial that followed became one of the marking posts for the '60s' 'revolution', with arguments for the beauty of Lawrence's descriptions of love and sex finally conquering the prudish sensibilities that Lawrence so despised and leading to a landmark legal ruling in Penguin's favour. For all the campaigning and crusading that has accompanied Lady Chatterley's Lover, it remains in essence a beautiful description of a true and lasting passion. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Samantha Bond. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/slks/000027/bk_slks_000027_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
- Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
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The Just So Stories , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 200min
'In the high and far off times...' begins Rudyard Kipling's 'How the Elephant Got His Trunk', and off we are taken by one of the most supreme storytellers into a world where children’s questions are turned neatly on their heads and questions are provided which, far from stopping the stream of enquiries, only serve to make it gush faster. These astonishingly funny and remarkably clever tales were first conceived for Kipling's eldest daughter, Josephine, who died in the influenza outbreak of 1899 and follow directly from the tale told to Mowgli in the second Jungle Book (1895) of 'How the Tiger Got His Stripes'. They have become some of the most popular children’s works. Even when Kipling's other writing was undergoing a vicious backlash against a fairly obvious affection for the British Colonial system, 'The Just So Stories' remained firmly untouched by the swingeing criticism. And quite rightly, they are glorious. Children love the innovatively mistaken narrator and Kipling's gently wicked undermining of the voice of authority, a line which leads directly to the children's books of such modern writers as Roald Dahl. Parents love the provoking of enquiry, which Kipling believed to be the greatest tool with which a child should be equipped. The rest of us just love the beauty of the writing and the fact that these stories remain extremely funny. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Art Malik. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/slks/000026/bk_slks_000026_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
- Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
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Black Beauty , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 334min
This is one of the most famous children's books ever written. Since its publication in 1877, it has sold well over 30 million copies. It held the world record for sales far and above any other piece of children's literature for 130 years, until the year 1997, when a certain novel named Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published. It wasn’t, however, written for children - the story of the highly spirited and gorgeous black stallion and his transfer from owner to increasingly abusive owner until his final happy rescue was originally intended to be a campaigning work distributed to those who worked with horses in the middle of the 19th century. But there was something about the story which led to its becoming one of the most successful pieces of children's literature ever written. The great success of Black Beauty was partly due to the novelty of telling the story from the horse's point of view, unheard of in 1877, when horses were not even supposed to have points of view. The clarity, simplicity and energy of that voice is still astonishing, but more astonishing in the 1870s was the public reaction to the book,. This gentle Quaker woman used the voice of a strong, black horse to undermine most of the assumptions of working Victorian Britain. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Colin Salmon. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/slks/000008/bk_slks_000008_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
- Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
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The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 59min
Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales is one of the most influential pieces of writing in the British literary canon. It helped to establish English, rather than Latin or Norman French, as an acceptable language for literature. It was also one of the earliest pieces of work to have story linking - what had previously been just collected writings which the author deemed interesting. Following the model of such early masterpieces as Boccacio's Decameron, Chaucer collected several styles and types of stories together - political treatises, bawdy pub stories, courtly romances and moral tales - joining them together under the conceit of a group of pilgrims bound for Canterbury, swapping tales, somewhat competitively, in an inn in Southwark, South London. The prologue to the tales is therefore an important piece of literature in its own right. Before The Canterbury Tales and its like, it didn’t really matter in what order you read the works collected in one volume; the first item could just as well be read last. The prologue not only introduces all the characters you are about to meet; it also sets the scene for you, painting a picture of what has become one of the most famous of literary Aprils and linking the forthcoming stories with a series of jousting type attempts by the tellers to top each other and exact revenge for previous insults. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Terry Jones. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/slks/000043/bk_slks_000043_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
- Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
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Beowulf, Hörbuch, Digital, 73min
The epic story of this hero’s battle against dragons, monsters, and their mothers is particularly suited to being recorded as an audiobook given that for the first 300 years of its existence it was only ever spoken. The first known (and indeed the only surviving manuscript) of the poem was written in AD 1,000. It survived Henry VIII’s attempts to destroy it (as a religious artifact) and a catastrophic fire that destroyed many other historical British documents - the marks of the fire are still visible on the manuscript, now safely housed in the British Museum. But the poem and indeed its mythical original tale date back to the eighth or ninth century and before that to the mythologies of Scandaniavia. It is because this poem is in itself an adaptation of ancient sagas that we have allowed ourselves the only abridgement or adaptation on the website! Julian Glover’s version takes the poem back to its origins as a spoken tale. He has taken the essence of the poem and, with a scholarly eye to the British Museum’s manuscript, created a truly bardic performance. Beowulf’s battles against Grendel (the monster who takes you in your sleep) and the original lethal female, his mother, who comes to avenge her son’s killing, are faithfully transformed from their singed original to a roaring reality. Language: English. Narrator: Julian Glover. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/slks/000007/bk_slks_000007_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
- Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 170min
Alice's rather wild adventures in Wonderland begin on an unadventurous picnic, when her attention, wandering off from the lesson it was supposed to be glued to, is caught by a passing white rabbit who happens to be wearing a waistcoat and muttering to himself, "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!" As he disappears down a rabbit hole, and Alice, for want of anything better to do, follows him, a tale of almost hallucinogenic wildness unfolds as she finds herself in Wonderland - a fantastical world where the characters Alice meets and the situations in which she finds herself have the whiff of symbol and allegory about them but are too whimsical to be pinned down as such. The story of how Alice's Adventures in Wonderland came to be written, and the author’s association with the Liddell family - and Alice Liddell in particular - is now the stuff of legend. One summer afternoon in 1862, the author, in the company of the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, took the three Liddell sisters, Lorina Charlotte, Alice Pleasance and Edith Mary, out in a rowing boat on the River Thames, near Oxford. On that boat trip, he entertained the girls by telling them a story about a bored little girl called Alice who goes looking for an adventure. Two years later, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published - and sold out rapidly. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Julia McKenzie. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/slks/000001/bk_slks_000001_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
- Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
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Robinson Crusoe , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 641min
Robinson Crusoe is considered by many to be the first novel in the English language. The term 'Robinsonade' has even been coined to describe the various spin-offs of Robinson Crusoe. It is astonishing how much of the book has become part of the language; the very term 'Robinson Crusoe' has become synonymous with the concept of a castaway. Likewise, 'Man Friday', Crusoe's servant on the island, has become a name commonly used to describe an indispensable assistant who will turn his or her hand to anything. The idea of being marooned is one that grabs all of us, from the thought of the effects of isolation on the human mind to what records we'd take. Although there were many true tales of castaways in Defoe's time (his inspiration for Crusoe was probably a Scottish sailor named Alexander Selkirk, who was rescued in 1709 after four years on the uninhabited island of Más a Tierra in the Juan Fernández Islands off the Chilean coast), the attraction of Defoe's work is that it departs from the dryly factual and explores instead the thoughts, feelings and occupations of the castaway, and hence the story achieves its everyman status. The theme behind Crusoe's adventures is open to a wide range of interpretations. James Joyce saw him as a symbol of British colonialism; JP Hunter saw him as a pilgrim progressing through adversity and experience towards a closer relationship with God. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: David Warner. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/slks/000048/bk_slks_000048_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
- Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
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Heart of Darkness , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 268min
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is an exploration of the nature of evil and how far a man can go towards it when released from the constraints of what can be called civilisation. Before beginning his life as a writer at the age of 36, Conrad spent 16 years as a merchant seaman. In 1889 he became captain of a steamboat in the Congo Free State, and the atrocities he witnessed there, perpetrated by the representatives of the Belgian colonial powers, led him to write what he called his Congo Diary. The repulsion Conrad felt for his time in the Congo was compounded by his infection whilst there with malaria, which left him with a malarial gout in the wrist of his writing hand, the pain of which would stay with him for the rest of his life. When Heart of Darkness was published in 1899, it echoed much of Conrad's horrific experience. The journey up the infested Congo River taken by his character Marlow is much like Conrad's own, but the ultimate antihero, Kurtz, with his compulsively magnetic madness, tinkering with the edges of pure evil, is a phenomenal literary creation, one which has excited imitations ever since, most famously in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now. It is a terrifying and exhilarating journey, with Conrad taking you to the very depths of human nature and, in Marlow’s case, leaving him there. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Toby Stephens. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/slks/000023/bk_slks_000023_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
- Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
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Father and Son , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 559min
Everyone has a swipe at their parents and the way they were brought up at some point in their lives; very few of us exact revenge to the extent that Edmund Gosse did upon his father in this superbly funny, agonising account of a very strange childhood. The subtitle of the book is A Study of Two Temperaments, and these were temperaments not destined to get on. Gosse, Sr. was an eminent naturalist and zoologist and a keen follower of the Plymouth Brethren. Gosse, Jr. had a natural leaning towards the arts and would grow up to be one of Victorian England's leading literary figures. The battle lines were drawn. Throw into the picture the struggle already taking place within Gosse, Sr. (and most of the rest of the country) to reconcile his faith with the new theory of evolution as expounded by his fellow naturalist, Charles Darwin, and backed up by his own zoological studies, and you have the makings of a seriously entertaining fight. This is a beautifully wry description of the attempt of a son to extricate himself from the vast influence of his father. Much has been made of Edmund Gosse's (possibly necessary) adjustment of the facts, but you can understand his need to speak out a bit when the entry in his father’s journal for the day of his birth reads, 'E. delivered of a son. Received green swallow from Jamaica'. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Geoffrey Palmer. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/slks/000017/bk_slks_000017_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
- Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping