Showing results by publisher "Ascent Audio" in Literary Fiction

The Sorrows of Young Werther is a loosely based autobiographical novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was first published in 1774 and is one of the most famous-and infamous-works in the history of literature. Werther, a sensitive young man falls in love with Lotte, a sweet-natured girl he meets while visitng an idyllic German village. Although Lotte is betrothed to Albert, Werther’s infatuation with her torments him to the point of despair and suicide.

Nikolay is tired of his dull life working at a railway station and his loveless marriage. When he accidentally breaks a champagne bottle on New Year’ s Eve, his wife is convinced that it is an omen of bad luck to come. Nikolay, already dissatisfied with his life, thinks his wife is overreacting. His feels that not much more could go wrong in his life. Then, in the brink of his despair, a young and beautiful visitor, his wife’s aunt, arrives unexpectedly.

There has been an accident. A girl sits inside a car, her behavior seemingly indifferent to the chaos outside. Karle has been there for hours. Her eyes will not focus on what is happening outside. Instead she remembers the hours before she came to be there. She and her mother had been in the airport waiting for her brother Benjamin to come home. Karle’s brother was a soldier who had just come home for shore leave. They had always been close.

As two friends are sharing stories together, the story of the man in the box comes up. The man in the box, Byelikov, was an eccentric professor who often made his coworkers feel uneasy. One day, Byelikov finds himself enamored with the sister of a new teacher at the school, Kovalenko. The prospect of a relationship between Byelikov and the sister, Varinka, excited his colleagues as they thought it might help to make him more normal and approachable. However, when someone takes it upon himself to draw a humorous caricature of the couple, things fall apart.