Showing results by narrator "Christopher Ragland" in All Categories

Francis Bret Harte was born on 25th August 1836 in Albany New York. As a young boy Harte developed an early love of books and reading. He first published at the tender age of 11, his satirical poem ‘Autumn Musings’. Expecting praise he received anything but and later wrote "Such a shock was their ridicule to me that I wonder that I ever wrote another line of verse." He was instrumental in propelling the short story genre forward and brought tales of the Old West and the Gold Rush to a greater audience.

Francis Bret Harte was born on 25th August 1836 in Albany New York. As a young boy Harte developed an early love of books and reading. He first published at the tender age of 11, his satirical poem ‘Autumn Musings’. Expecting praise he received anything but and later wrote "Such a shock was their ridicule to me that I wonder that I ever wrote another line of verse." He was instrumental in propelling the short story genre forward and brought tales of the Old West and the Gold Rush to a greater audience.

PEOPLE LIKE ME is a wonderfully all encompassing love story. It not only explores filial love and the drive for parenthood, but also poses fundamental questions for society: how many types of love, partners, friendships, families and emotional ties exist in our modern world? How is a family...

Zeitgeist is a modern cyber thriller, the hero is a Big Data analyst, who can use i.e. data from your phone to predict your future behavior – and it's not made up, it's real, the author works for big companies doing just that, but on bigger consumer groups, to predict future trends on the...

New York, mid-21st century. Things aren't going well for Aiden. Not long ago he was a successful lawyer with a swanky East Village apartment and a glamorous fiancé. Now he is faced with the ruins of his existence and on top of that he has the feeling that he is going insane. Wanda is...

In this series we listen to short stories that are NOT by perhaps the most well-known author of this type. But the many other rich talents in the volume may have treated the subject matter a little differently, or were perhaps just overlooked in the stampede to applaud the winner, but these authors are of equal merit.

Throughout the long centuries of human history is the want, and the need, to share information, to exchange ideas and for that knowledge and experience, for curiosity and learning, to be the basis of a civil society. In this volume we offer up a small selection of talents from the literary landscape of the American male author whose time has now come again.

In this series we explore the many facets of love through literary talents that span both time and country. Love is good. It’s positive, a source of joy, nourishment and all over goodness. But sometimes other more malevolent forces come to play. They infect that love, they see their form as better. Instinctively we would shy away but sometimes its pull is too powerful, almost attractive. We are drawn closer into the shadows.

The American West. A landscape hewn in vastness as its rips from Plains, to deserts, to mountain, to ocean overlaid by waves of emigration of peoples either dispossessed or searching for a new life and the American dream. These are their stories. Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota into an upper-middle class family. Whilst his mother was pregnant with him, his two young sisters tragically died. Fitzgerald once said this was when his destiny as a writer was ordained. In 1913 he enrolled at Princeton but his devotion to his own literary pursuits resulted in him leaving and, rather bizarrely, joining the Army. He continued to write with great mastery and the titles of his novels and many of his 164 short stories are household names.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on 4th July 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, a town synonymous with the earlier Salem Witch Trials. It was instrumental in Hawthorne’s later use of American Gothic and dark romanticism in his writing. He was a mere four years old when his father died and his mother took him and his two sisters to live with her family and then on to their own home in Raymond, Maine. The young Hawthorne had a passion for fiction and poetry and voraciously read the works of Ann Radcliffe, Henry Fielding and Lord Byron.

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. They can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere. Jack London is widely regarded as one of America’s pre-eminent writers of the great outdoors. His stories are raw and, at times, harrowing, but always dependable fare. His work also includes stories on pandemics and bizarre scientific experiments. An author so much more than the usual wrapper proclaims.

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. They can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere. For America, as the century closes, she is becoming less isolated. Her industrial might, her rising military power are pulling her ever closer into the entangled globe of nations. Her authors flex ideas and lexicons with riveting tales of this astonishing society.

Henry Fleming, a young soldier in the American Civil War, grapples with fear, courage, and the realities of battle. He joins the Union army with grandiose ideas of heroism, but when he faces the brutal truth of war, he is overcome by fear and runs from the battlefield in his first encounter with the enemy. After fleeing, Henry is consumed with shame and guilt. He struggles internally, questioning his own courage and trying to come to terms with his actions.