Showing results by narrator "John Burlinson" in All Categories

The collection contains eight of Shakespeare’s best loved comedies. Each exhibits the vigour, humour, and optimism of the young master before he turned to the gloom and bitterness of the great tragedies.

While exploring the beach, four adventurous children make the acquaintance of a very odd creature: a sand fairy. When they have adapted to the brusque and forthright demeanor of the fairy, they discover that he has unusual powers, which he can be persuaded to demonstrate. As a result, the children enjoy many bizarre adventures, some of which are dangerous, but all of which are entertaining. Five Children and It is the first volume of a trilogy.

Queen Marguerite de Navarre was one of the most powerful women of her age. Her masterpiece, The Heptameron, is a collection of some 72 stories told by five gentlemen and five ladies who find themselves stranded in an abbey. Proposed as an edifying way of passing the time while a bridge is being repaired, the tale-telling - as well as the conversations that follow each story - quickly becomes a battle of wits between the sexes, with tales concerning illicit lovers, romantic conquests, lecherous monks, manly honor, and women's virtue.

Endymion is the largest work by John Keats and was composed between April and November 1817. It was published in April 1818, and the critical reception was almost universally hostile. The plot is built around the ancient Greek legend of Endymion, the young shepherd whose beauty was such that the goddess of the Moon entreated Zeus to cast him into a permanent sleep so that she could gaze on him without interruption. Keats expands this story into an epistle on beauty and love, and weaves into it elements from several other Greek legends.

Crazy Horse was as much feared by tribal foes as he was honored by allies. His war record was unmatched by any of his peers, and his rout of Custer at the Little Bighorn reverberates through history. Yet so much about him is unknown or steeped in legend. Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life corrects older, idealized accounts - and draws on a greater variety of sources than other recent biographies - to expose the real Crazy Horse: not the brash Sioux warrior we have come to expect but a modest, reflective man whose courage was anchored in Lakota piety.

In Specters of God, John D. Caputo returns to the original impulse of his work, the "mystical element" in things, here under the name of an "anxious apophatics," as distinct from an "edifying apophatics" anchored in unity with God. In dialogue with Schelling, a new turn for him and the lynchpin of this argument, Caputo addresses the nocturnal powers in being, the specters that haunt our being and bring us up short.

This collection of articles on constitutional government was written by three of the most significant figures in the establishment of the United States as sovereign nation. Alexander Hamilton, one of the most influential of the Founding Fathers, was the author of 51 of the 85 articles. James Madison, who later served as the fourth president, contributed 29 articles. The remaining five articles were written by John Jay, who was active in a number of public positions, including chief justice, various cabinet posts under Washington and governor of New York.

In As You Like It, a wicked Duke expels his virtuous brother, the lawful ruler, from his domains. The banished Duke takes refuge with his followers in the Forest of Arden, where they live as free a life as did Robin Hood and his merry men.

As the first important, book-length academic study in English of four of Shakespeare's major tragedies—Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth—Bradley's work both influenced and enabled modern Shakespearean literary criticism even as it engaged with, and often rebutted, conventional Romantic and Victorian interpretations of the plays and their author. Bradley's achievement has been widely praised for its philosophical and psychological insights and has never been out of print.

Euripides (c. 480-406 B.C.E.) is the author of eighteen extant plays and many more only surviving in fragments. He is the youngest of the three great Athenian tragedians with Aeschylus and Sophocles. Hippolytus, bastard son of Theseus and the Amazon Hippolyta, has sworn chaste allegiance to the goddess Artemis, thus severely offending the goddess Aphrodite by failing to revere her. Aphrodite swears revenge and promises that he will die before the day is done, taking with him Queen Phaedra, wife of Theseus.

The notorious pirate Captain Flint is dead, and his great horde of stolen treasure lies lost, stashed and buried on an island far, far away. Jim Hawkins, the humble son of a country innkeeper, comes into possession of the only map to Flint's treasure and is soon swept away on a high seas adventure of treachery and survival.

The Ring and the Book is a verse novel of sex, lies, and murder, authored by Robert Browning, and it is widely considered to be one of the greatest literary works of the 19th century. It’s a “true crime” story based on the proceedings of a Roman murder trial held in 1698. Each of the 12 books consists of a dramatic monologue in the voice of a different character involved in the tale.

R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) is a science-fiction drama that was first presented in Czech in 1921. It introduced the term "robot", which is derived from a Czech word meaning "worker," to international vocabulary. The action opens in a factory that has successfully produced thousands of robots, who are essentially mindless drones. An idealistic humanitarian activist launches a plan to imbue some of the robots with human traits. The robots which have been humanized then assume leadership over the other robots and seek to organize them in a revolution to take over the world.

The Wild Duck (Vilanden) is a tragedy with comic episodes. Ibsen himself characterized the play as a tragicomedy. It depicts ordinary life realistically instead of romantically and sentimentally, a revolutionary concept in Ibsen's time. The play is now generally acknowledged as one of Ibsen's supreme accomplishments.

This collection contains a mixture of stories about ghosts and contacts from spirits, some by celebrated authors, together with essays on psychical research. As Joseph French notes in the preface, even for the skeptic, tales of ghostly activity retain a distinct fascination. The widespread interest in psychic phenomena in the early twentieth century proved to be a significant stimulus to literary production.

Rosmersholm is a play surrounding the deep and intense political and cultural change in Norway in the middle of the 1880s, a period during which the traditional ruling class were forced to relinquish their right to impose their ideals on the rest of society. We follow Johannes Rosmer, a pastor who has resigned from his position; Rebecca West, a woman who sees Rosmer's potential and believes she can help him to realize his dream of creating a world of "happy, noble people"; and Headmaster Kroll, Rosmer's former best friend.

The little known first novella of Charlotte Bronte, The Green Dwarf is a story of adventure, subterfuge, romance, and danger. Lady Emily Charlesworth is awaiting the return of her lover, Leslie, who is a down-on-his luck artist. However, the dastardly, coldhearted Colonel Percy is also vying for her heart and will stop at nothing to make Emily his own.

Lewis Carroll's delightful sequel to Alice in Wonderland finds seven-year-old Alice off on another exciting adventure into Looking-Glass World. On her journey, she meets life-size chess pieces, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Humpty Dumpty, and a host of fairy-tale creatures.

A wife abandoned to the savage Sioux...a bold young beauty fights against two worlds of powerful men in search of love and fulfillment.

As the generating force of its plot, Twelfth Night uses a device which has since become a staple in comedy: gender confusion. Viola and her twin brother Sebastian, are shipwrecked on the coast of Illyria, a country ruled by the melancholy Duke Orsino. The twins are separated and Viola is led to believe that her brother has perished. She disguises herself as a male under the name of Cesario and makes her way to the ducal court, where Orsino employs her as a messenger, to communicate his love to the reclusive lady, Olivia—who is not willing to return his affection.