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

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.

Captain David Grief, South Pacific tycoon, owns plantations and trading stations from New Guinea to Samoa, pearling fisheries in the Paumotus, and rubber acreages in the Louisiades. His own vessels recruit contract labor, and he operates three steamers on ocean runs. He came to the South Seas at the age of 20 and, blessed with a blond skin impervious to tropical rays, became browner through two decades as a true "son of the sun". At 40 years of age, he looks no more than 30.

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.

During a trip to Europe, wealthy American businessman Christopher Newman proposes marriage to the scintillating and beautiful aristocrat Claire de Cintré. To his dismay, he comes up against the machinations of her impoverished but proud family, who find Newman to be a vulgar example of the American privileged class. Brilliantly combining elements of comedy, tragedy, romance, and melodrama, this tale of thwarted desire vividly contrasts nineteenth-century American and European manners.

Just as Anne had to use a male pseudonym in order to publish, Helen Graham, the novel's protagonist and a battered wife, must assume an alias in order to gain freedom from her suffering. With her young child, Helen takes up residence at Wildfell Hall, shrouding her past in secrecy, yet earning the attentions of a young, unmarried country gentlemen.

This spare, mesmerizing novel is Edith Wharton's money-can't-buy-happiness tale. Young Stephen Glennard, a lawyer, is poor, but he has an unanticipated gambling chip: a collection of love letters from a scorned, but now famous, lover, the distinguished novelist Margaret Aubyn. To raise money for his forthcoming wedding to another woman, Stephen stoops to selling the letters.

Here is the world's most famous master plan for seizing and holding power. Astonishing in its candor, The Prince is a disturbingly realistic and prophetic work on what it takes to be a prince, a king, a president.

Through 23 connected short stories, the author looks into the lives of the inhabitants of a small town in the American heartland. In a simple and intense style, these psychological portraits of the sensitive and imaginative of Winesburg's population are seen through the eyes of a young reporter-narrator, George Willard. Their stories are about loneliness and alienation, passion and virginity, wealth and poverty, thrift and profligacy, carelessness and abandon.

Here is the continuing adventure of one of fiction�s most dramatic heroes, Tarzan the ape-man. In this new episode, Tarzan has given up his jungle ways and is living contentedly on a farm with his beloved wife, Jane, as a wealthy member of British nobility. But when he returns one day from a trip to Nairobi, he finds his farm has been laid to waste by German troops, with no one left alive.

El Arte de la Guerra es el mejor libro de estrategia de todos los tiempos. Inspiró a Napoleón, Maquiavelo, Mao Tse Tung, y muchas más figuras históricas. Este libro de dos mil quinientos años de antigüedad es uno de los más importantes textos clásicos Chinos, en el que, a pesar del tiempo transcurrido, ninguna de sus máximas ha quedado anticuada, ni hay un solo consejo que hoy no sea útil. Pero la obra del general Sun-tzu no es únicamente un libro de práctica militar....

Kimball O'Hara is an Irish orphan, but he runs free in the streets of India. As a boy, he shows self-reliance and resourcefulness, running errands for Mahbub Ali, who works for the British Secret Service. Kim also meets a Tibetan lama who is on a quest to be freed from the Wheel of Life and becomes his disciple. Together they have wonderful adventures on the exotically colorful Grand Trunk Road through the Indian countryside.

In this classic tale of the death of childhood, there is a savage comedy that owes much to Dickens. But for his portrayal of the child’s capacity for intelligent wonder, James summons all the subtlety he devotes elsewhere to his most celebrated adult protagonists. In the aftermath of an acrimonious divorce, young Maisie Farange finds herself shuttled back and forth between her father and mother and their new spouses, all of whom are monstrously self-involved. Neglected and exploited by everyone around her, Maisie herself becomes a pretext for sexual intrigue when her stepparents become attracted to each other.

You Know Me, Al is a classic of baseball, the game and the community. Jack Keefe, one of literature's great characters, is talented, brash, and conceited. Self-assured and imperceptive, impervious to both advice and sarcasm, Keefe rises to the heights, but his inability to learn makes for his undoing. Through a series of letters from this bush-league pitcher to his not-quite-anonymous friend Al, Lardner maintains a balance between the funny and the moving, the pathetic and the glorious.

Rooted in an actual case of wife-selling in early nineteenth-century England, the story builds into an awesome Sophoclean drama of guilt and revenge, in which the strong, willful Henchard rises to a position of wealth and power, only to achieve a most bitter downfall. Proud, obsessed, ultimately committed to his own destruction, Henchard is, as Albert Guerard has said, "Hardy's Lord Jim...his only tragic hero and one of the greatest tragic heroes in all fiction."

An ingenious Yankee mechanic, knocked unconscious in a fight, awakens to find himself in Camelot in 528 A.D. Imprisoned by Sir Kay the Seneschal and exhibited before the knights of the Round Table, he is condemned to death but saves himself by posing as a Merlin-like magician, correctly predicting an eclipse, and becoming a minister to King Arthur. He increases his power by applying 19th century knowledge of gunpowder, electricity, and industrial methods.

Abandoned by her lover and left to bring up their two children alone, Gervaise Macquart has to fight to earn an honest living. When she accepts the marriage proposal of Monsieur Coupeau, it seems as though she is on the path to a decent, respectable life at last. But with her husband's drinking and the unexpected appearance of a figure from her past, Gervaise's plans begin to unravel tragically.

The author of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle", Washington Irving perfected the American short story. His stories were written in an approachable tone and intended to entertain rather than enlighten. Originally published in 1819, "The Spectre Bridegroom" is a ghost story about a baron and his daughter in historic Germany. The tale revolves around the daughter’s betrothal to Count Van Altenburg and the strange occurrences that lead up to the wedding. One of the few Irving stories set outside of the United States, "The Spectre Bridegroom" is often seen as a commentary on the differences between American and European society.

Eugenia, a baroness divorced from a German prince, and her bohemian brother, Felix, are coming back to America. Raised and cultured in Europe, they are returning destitute to New England to seek out their rich and innocent cousins.