Showing results by publisher "Phoenix Books" in World Literature

For decades, a quartet of Chinese women who have emigrated to San Francisco gather to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk—they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Over the years, their stories have informed the lives of four daughters who feel the weight of family and world history on their shoulders. With wit and sensitivity, this novel explores the deep, complicated, and sometimes painful connections between mothers and daughters.

This rich and charming novel about a virtuous young woman's search for love amidst the fickle world of country gentry in Regency England is one of Jane Austen's most memorable works. Anne Elliot exists in a world where shallowness and hypocrisy present a challenge to her centered values and tender emotions. Anne vies for the affections of the man she loves while at the same time her willpower is threatened as she battles the conventions of a proper parochial society.

One day, 14-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find two notes in her mailbox, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up?

This story of Lord Rama — the 7th incarnation of Lord Vishnu— i s a wondrous tale of cosmic adventure that immerses the listener in a world of heroes, gods, and demons.

For decades, a quartet of Chinese women who have emigrated to San Francisco gather to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk — they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Over the years, their stories have informed the lives of four daughters who feel the weight of family and world history on their shoulders.

For decades — in China and in San Francisco — Winnie Louie and Helen Kwong have kept each other's confidences, but those secrets are about to be revealed. Convinced that she is dying, Helen decides to celebrate the Chinese New Year by unburdening herself of hidden truths — not only hers, but those of Winnie and of Winnie's daughter, Pearl.

Mr. & Mrs. Bridge is the saga of a clean-cut, "upper-class" couple who increasingly find their post-WWII world and traditional belief systems challenged by a changing society. For Walter Bridge, an ambitious lawyer, and his wife, whose focus is her household, affluence and material comforts create a cocoon of community respectability that cloaks the void within.

A masterful portrait of desire and betrayal that takes place during the sumptuous Gilded Age, The Age of Innocence questions the morals and assumptions of elite 1870s New York society when "scandal was more dreaded than disease." Newland Archer, gentleman lawyer and heir to one of New York City's best families, is happily anticipating a highly desirable marriage to the beautiful but conventional May Welland—until May's exotic European cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska returns to New York society.

The period of English romantic poetry occurred roughly between 1800 and 1850 and was represented by poets such as William Blake, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth. All of these poets are featured in this collection of more than 50 poems read by award-winning actors that include Joan Allen, Julie Christie, Stephen Fry, Glenda Jackson, and Jude Law.

Rainer Maria Rilke has been called the most significant and compelling poet of spiritual experience of the 20th century. His exploration of the struggle between life and art and the supremacy of divine love over personal love has touched the hearts of men and women everywhere. The poems in this reading are from the selected poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell.

Drawing upon everyday incidents, common situations, and rural imagery, Robert Frost fashioned poetry of great lyrical beauty and potent symbolism. His language is simple, clear, and colloquial, yet dense with meaning and wider significance. This brilliant collection features some of Frost's greatest works, including "The Road Not Taken," "Asking for Roses," "The Death of the Hired Man," "In the Home Stretch," "Into My Own," "Meeting and Passing," "Mending Wall," and more.

Middle-aged Lucas Corso is a tired and cynical book detective, a mercenary hired to hunt down rare editions for wealthy and unscrupulous clients. When a well-known bibliophile is found hanged, leaving behind part of the original manuscript of Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, Corso is brought in to authenticate the fragment. Soon the unsuspecting Corso is drawn into a swirling plot involving devil worship, occult practices, and swashbuckling derring-do among a cast of characters bearing a suspicious resemblance to those of Dumas' masterpiece.

In this seventh installment of the Jeeves series, the unflappable butler once again must apply his cleverness to rescue Bertie Wooster—this time from being arrested, lynched, and engaged by mistake! Chaos ensues when Aunt Dahlia demands that Bertie help dupe an antique dealer into selling her an 18th-century cow creamer. Complications grow as Bertie's pal Gussie Fink-Nottle is more interested in studying the effects of a full moon on the love life of newts rather than marrying Madeline Bassett.

Originally meant to be heard rather than read, this great epic returns to the oral form for today's listeners.

Years after her Chinese half-sister assails her with ghost stories set in the mysterious world of Yin, Olivia — a young woman from San Francisco — finds herself in China. Looking for a way to reconcile her past with dreams for her future, Olivia's American assumptions are shaken by Chinese ghosts, but she also finds reasons to hope.

The disastrous banjo-playing of Bertram "Bertie" Wooster has driven the otherwise steadfast gentleman's gentleman Jeeves to give notice—because even butlers have limits. In anger, Bertie disappears to the country with his new valet Brinkley as a guest of Lord “Chuffy” Chuffnell, who has employed the services of the recently resigned Jeeves. Bertie soon finds himself in no shortage of trouble as he encounters his ex-fiancée Pauline, her formidable father, and the eminent looney-doctor Sir Roderick Glossop.

This timeless saga traces the intertwined lives of a group of prosperous Jewish Holocaust survivors in New York City after World War II. A chain of events disrupts the close-knit community as each refugee struggles to reconcile the horrific past with the difficult present and explores both the nature of faith and the nature of love. Marriages and affairs fall apart; age and death take their toll; the wisdom of the scripture and kabbalah and the precepts of the great philosophers and avatars of modern science are passionately debated in extended conversations that seethe with drama.

The poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke addresses the issues of God, death, and "destructive time." Rilke tries to transform these problems into an inner world, what he calls "a whole inner world as if an angel, comprehending all space, were blind and looking into himself." Eminent author and translator Stephen Mitchell brings these ideas vividly to life in this new translation of Rilke's most transcendent works.

Henry Miller's gifts of profundity, humor, and spiritual sensitivity are well displayed in this collection of insights into the human character. The pieces range from the delightfully raucous to the metaphysically illuminating. The pieces range from the delightfully raucous to the metaphysically illuminating. Included here are mini-portraits of the renowned—Swiss astrologer Conrad Moricand, collage artist Jean Varda, Swiss-French novelist Blaise Cendrars, and American painter Beauford Delaney—as well as the anonymous figures who crossed Miller's path, including his first high school romance…

In this treasury of passionate and humorous encounters with animals, Stephen Mitchell has collected animal poems from many ages and cultures. Included here are excerpts from ancient masterpieces like The Hymn to the Sun by Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, The Book of Job, as well as haikus by Basho and Issa.