61 Results for : slks
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The Diary of a Nobody , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 293min
Written as the diary of someone who would not normally merit a memoir but considers that he should have one written about him anyway, The Diary of a Nobody chronicles in agonizing but very funny detail everyday life in the lower middle class suburbs of Victorian England and the attempts of a social climber to better himself. It was published in 1892. First published in the satirical magazine Punch as a serial between 1888 and 1889, with illustrations by the author’s brother, Weedon, The Diary of a Nobody did to late Victorian society what Alan Partridge has done for not-very-celebrated celebrities. The book coined the word Pooterism - the tendency to take oneself way too seriously - and helped to popularise a rather more familiar word from the name of one of its characters - Mr Murray Posh. But for all Mr Pooter’s petty snobbery and his tragic-comic social pretension, we love this character and even identify with him at some level, if we are honest with ourselves! This is the diary of someone who acknowledges that he is not a somebody but would dearly love to be! Author George Grossmith (1847-1912) was born in London to a theatrical family. The comic genius which characterised his literary work was also evident in his approach to performance. He was noted for his ability to get laughs, sometimes at the expense of the show as a whole. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Geoffrey Palmer. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/slks/000011/bk_slks_000011_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
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Markheim , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 49min
The stabbing of an antique dealer on Christmas Day leads the murderer, Markheim, to try to justify his life to the devil in an in-depth discussion about the nature of good and evil. His evening ends quite differently from how he'd planned it and results in him making an admission of guilt for the killing.... Author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was born in Edinburgh into a prestigious family of lighthouse designers and engineers on his father's side and moral philosophers on his mother's. His mother's legacy to the young Stevenson was rather more damaging, however, in that he inherited her weak lungs, which dominated his short life until his death 44 years later. Stevenson did not begin writing seriously until he was 25, after he had acquired a legal qualification at his family's insistence. Maybe through the stress of completing a legal degree under duress, his health was seriously failing, and Stevenson was sent abroad to seek warmer climates. He travelled to France, where he felt an immediate affinity with the more easygoing Southern culture, changing his name from Lewis to Louis, following the French spelling. He fell in love in 1880 with Fanny Vandergrift Osbourne, an American fleeing an unhappy marriage, and, having followed her to America, nearly killed himself traversing the continent to find her in San Francisco. The rest of his life was spent chasing a climate that would help him in his fight against tuberculosis. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Alan Howard. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/slks/000037/bk_slks_000037_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
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Silas Marner , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 488min
Framed for a theft he didn’t commit and expelled from the church which has been his life, Silas Marner, the weaver, exiles himself to the remote rural village of Raveloe to bury himself in making money with his loom. The arrival of a golden-haired orphan toddler at his door, however, drags the recluse back into the world and away from his obsession with his hoard. This astonishingly beautiful tale of the importance of human relationships in the redemption of man is set in George Eliot's home county of Warwickshire and is filled with her own knowledge and affectionate dissection of the rural life she witnessed there. The dissenting church that Silas rejects so totally following the failure of his god to prove his innocence can be seen to mirror the dogma that Eliot herself rejected so fiercely in her own life. Having been a devout follower of a highly evangelical Christianity gleaned from her school days, as Eliot matured she left the self-repression of her youth behind and adopted a firm agnosticism, which she maintained until her death. Like her other novels, Silas Marner was not written until the writer was in her 40s (it was published in 1861), and the gentle rationalism that runs through the book and its belief in the remedial power of what Eliot called 'pure, natural human relations' create one of the most uplifting and positive of Eliot's works. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Sian Phillips. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/slks/000051/bk_slks_000051_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
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The Picture of Dorian Gray , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 495min
The most personal of Oscar Wilde's works, The Picture of Dorian Grey was also one of the earliest. It was published in 1891 and caused immediate controversy and great notoriety for its writer. The story of an immensely beautiful and hedonistic boy whose conscience becomes separate from his body and housed in a portrait which slowly and hideously ages and decays in keeping with his increasing depravity whilst the boy himself remains untouched plays with all of Oscar Wilde's theories of art and life. As a major proponent of aestheticism and its belief in art for art's sake, Wilde is examining his contention, made in the book, that all art is useless and should be. The flamboyant excess of the beautiful youth's life and the detachment he feels from his surroundings and fellow revellers echo Wilde's own rampant existence. There is even an exploration of Wilde's obsession with beauty and beautiful things in the repeated idea that when life gets too painful, human beings find escape in 'that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid'. The book is full of Wilde's astonishingly clever epigrams and witticisms. The detachment that Dorian feels from his society allows him a perfect vantage point from which to hurl some glorious insults. But like all of Wilde's work, the clever aphorisms and the all but perfect form hide a stingingly sharp and ultimately rather Catholic moral. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Crispin Bonham-Carter. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/slks/000039/bk_slks_000039_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
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The Miller's Tale: With Spoken Notes by Terry Jones , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 39min
In his own inimitable style, Terry Jones leads you through Chaucer's filthy and very funny tale of adultery, the feared coming of the second flood and burnt bums. The Canterbury Tales broke the literary mould in many ways. It established English as an acceptable language for literature, where previously it had been almost exclusively Latin or Norman French. It was also one of the first books to create a link between all the pieces of work in a literary collection. Before that an author had merely put together a group of pieces that he considered interesting, in no particular order and with no connecting narrative. Chaucer chose a meeting between pilgrims at the Tabard Inn on the road to Canterbury to provide the linking narrative for his Canterbury Tales. A group of pilgrims swap their tales, with a thoroughly human competitiveness and retaliatory jousting. The choice of pilgrims for his characters allowed Chaucer to put together types that wouldn't usually associate let alone talk. This recording of The Miller's Tale is a translation from the Middle English into modern language by the leading Chaucerian scholar, Terry Jones - yes, the Python one - who adds to his truly scholarly rendition of the text a smattering of highly useful and fascinating notes, recorded as he read. He also, of course, adds a particular dimension all his own to a tale of wicked bawdiness and bare asses. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Terry Jones. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/slks/000033/bk_slks_000033_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
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Kidnapped , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 437min
The wild adventure that David Balfour takes in Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped starts with the newly orphaned boy travelling to his uncle's terrifying House of Shaws. Having failed in an attempt to murder young David, the miserly Ebeneezer Balfour, who would rather keep the fortune to which the child is now entitled, arranges for a kidnapping aboard a ship bound for the new world. A fortunate collision with a small craft from France carrying young Balfour's saviour in the shape of Alan Breck Stewart saves the boy from the intended slavery and sets him on the extraordinary journey across the Highlands and island of Scotland that has become one of the most famous adventure stories of our time. Set against the backdrop of the Jacobite uprisings and the attempts by the Scottish clans to rid their country of the English, Stevenson used many of the real characters of the uprisings in his novel. Most importantly is Alan Breck Stewart, the chief suspect in the notorious murder of the English government man Colin Campbell placed on the Stewart estates following their forfeiture after the Stewarts' near conquering of the English at Culloden. Initially dismissed as a boys' yarn, Kidnapped has become one of the most influential of Stevenson's widely admired works. So much so that in 2007, when Edinburgh celebrated its year as the first UNESCO City of Literature, three versions of the book were made freely available to the public, with copies being left on buses and in other public places. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Nicholas Rowe. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/slks/000028/bk_slks_000028_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
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The Mill on the Floss , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 1256min
The Mill on the Floss is one of the great works of English literature. It is perhaps the most autobiographical of all Eliot's novels. The relationship between its heroine, Maggie Tulliver, and her brother, Tom, closely resembles that of George Eliot and her own brother, Isaac. The subject of sibling affection was clearly a deeply poignant one for George Eliot - she also wrote a series of beautiful and evocative sonnets entitled 'Brother and Sister'. Maggie's feelings as she nurses her dying father also echo those described by George Eliot in a letter when she was in the same situation. And there is something in the essential character and personality of Maggie that reminds us of her creator, of what we know of her from the life she led and the decisions she made. Like its predecessors, Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede, it is a domestic tale. And, like its predecessors, the book draws closely on people and places in Eliot's native Warwickshire. Although she did travel to Lincolnshire, where the story is set, to identify appropriate rivers for the apocalyptic flood, Dorlcote Mill closely resembles Arbury Mill, where the author played as a child. It is essentially a story of family loss, tragedy and the sheer cruelty of fate. Like many of George Eliot's heroines, Maggie Tulliver's intelligence and emotional capacity are her undoing; they create in her an appetite for greater things than the social restrictions of the day tended to offer women - a theme which characterises much of George Eliot's work. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Fiona Shaw. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/slks/000032/bk_slks_000032_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
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Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 326min
This is a selection of D. H. Lawrence’s short stories, mostly about women. Although much wider known for his novels and in particular for his forthright attitude to sex and its description in literature, it is for his short stories that Lawrence has most commonly gained critical acclaim. He was a beautiful creator of this most difficult of forms, giving us glimpses into the lives he describes in his stories, which often tell us more than full-length novels written by lesser hands. Set, as was Lawrence’s habit, within sight of the 'great blue heap of Nottingham', Love Among the Haystacks introduces us to the character of the wild and disobedient German governess mostly referred to as 'the Fräulein', whose passion and rarity drive two brothers to distraction with somewhat disastrous consequences. Lawrence was married to the German aristocrat Frieda von Richthofen just as England was entering and indeed going through the First World War, and his description and analysis of the British attitude to foreigners, and Germans in particular, is telling. 'Mother and Daughter' is a delightfully awful portrayal of that most difficult of roles, the mother-in-law; and 'The Rocking Horse Winner' explores the other side of the equation with a son’s desperate attempts to help his overly acquisitive mother, creating a sharply painful, almost parable-like tale. 'The Odour of Crysanthemums' is one of Lawrence's most famous short stories. It marked the beginning of his literary career when it was published in 1909 in the hugely influential magazine The Literary Review. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Geraldine James. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/slks/000029/bk_slks_000029_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
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Sonnets from the Portuguese , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 41min
The love affair between Elizabeth Barrett-Browning and Robert Browning is one of the most famous in literature. It begins in 1844 with Elizabeth Barrett, closeted in her room for five years through ill health and forbidden from marrying by her nonconformist father, publishing the most recent of her highly successful literary works, a collection of poetry. The poems prompt a letter from Robert Browning in praise of her work, which so touches her that she agrees to let him into her voluntary seclusion. The love that burgeons from this first visit is chronicled in Sonnets from the Portuguese - Browning called her his 'Portuguese' in reference to her dark skin and almost black hair. Written as petrarchan sonnets over the two years following their secret marriage and flight to Italy, these are some of the best loved and most moving love poems ever written. The 13th sonnet - 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways' - has become one of the world’s favourite love poems. Barrett-Browning captures all the joy and innocence of a passionate love as well as the doubt and fear - she was amazed that Browning, six years her junior and full of health and vigour, could love her as much as he professed to. The Barrett-Brownings had a long and seemingly blissful marriage, with Elizabeth dying in Italy, in his arms, in 1861. The sonnets remain a testament to a love that seems rare and precious, and the truth of these beautiful poems lives on. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Jane Horrocks. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/slks/000050/bk_slks_000050_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
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Frankenstein , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 547min
The tale of Dr. Frankenstein and the horrendous monster he unleashes on the world when he tinkers with the laws of nature had almost as strange a birth as the monster itself. It was the product of one of the most famous ghost story telling sessions in history. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and several others were stranded on the shores of Lake Geneva during a particularly sodden summer. They challenged each other to come up with the most ghastly and soul-rending story their sizable literary talents could muster, and the hands-down winner came from Shelley's wife - Mary Shelley. The novel that emerged several years later has been recognised as one of the most chilling and gruesome horror stories ever written, and it is certainly one of the most famous. It's a moving account of a battle for independence, it's a warning against man's pride in his ability to change the world with his blind pursuit of science, it's a story of revolt and revenge and, most intriguingly, it was one of the first novels to be written where the narrator is not necessarily a reliable witness, and we are left to carve the truth of the matter out for ourselves. This is an alarming book - in several very enjoyable ways. Author Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1797-1851) was a novelist, dramatist, essayist, biographer and travel writer. She is, however, best known for her Gothic horror novel Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus, published 1818. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Derek Jacobi. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/slks/000019/bk_slks_000019_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
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