Showing results by narrator "Mark Young" in All Categories

In a town full of suffering poor people, a swallow who was left behind after his flock flew off to Egypt for the winter meets the statue of the late "Happy Prince", who has never experienced true sorrow, for he lived in a palace where sorrow was not allowed to enter. Viewing various scenes of people suffering in poverty from his tall monument, the Happy Prince asks the swallow to take the ruby from his hilt, the sapphires from his eyes, and the gold leaf covering his body to give to the poor.

Dick and Nicole Diver are a glamorous couple who rent a villa in the South of France and surround themselves with a coterie of American expatriates. Rosemary Hoyt, a 17-year-old actress, and her mother are staying at a nearby resort. Rosemary becomes infatuated with Dick and becomes close to Nicole.

"The Sign of the Four" (1890), also called "The Sign of Four", is the second novel featuring Sherlock Holmes written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle wrote four novels and 56 short stories featuring the fictional detective. The story is set in 1888. "The Sign of the Four" has a complex plot involving service in India, the Indian Rebellion of 1857, a stolen treasure, and a secret pact among four convicts ("the Four" of the title) and two corrupt prison guards.

Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, often published as 1984, is a dystopian social science fiction novel by English novelist George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, Nineteen Eighty-Four centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of persons and behaviours within society. Orwell, himself a democratic socialist, modelled the authoritarian government in the novel after Stalinist Russia.

Habits are inevitable. The human brain craves habits so that it does not have to work so hard and is not involved in constant decision making. The brain does not want to have to think about every step you need to back your car out of the driveway and companies do not want to reinvent the hiring process every time they hire someone new. That is why habits form, to make things easier. What distinguishes successful people from unsuccessful people is whether we choose to control habits or we let them control us.

When a young solicitor, Jonathan Harker, visits the heart of Transylvania - ostensibly to meet reclusive nobleman Count Dracula - he cannot begin to imagine what horrors might lie in store for him there...or the chain of events he will set in motion at Castle Dracula. Soon, Dracula's bloodlust spreads to England's shores, and Harker's fiancée, Mina Murray, becomes embroiled in his affairs.

The fascinating and heartbreaking account of the first publicly exhibited captive killer whale a story that forever changed the way we see orcas and sparked the movement to save them. Killer whales had always been seen as bloodthirsty sea monsters. That all changed when a young killer whale was captured off the west coast of North America and displayed to the public in 1964. Moby Doll, as the whale became known, was an instant celebrity, drawing 20,000 visitors on the one and only day he was exhibited.

This story concerns a firework, who is one of many to be let off at the wedding of a prince and princess. The rocket is extremely pompous and self-important, and denigrates all the other fireworks, eventually bursting into tears to demonstrate his "sensitivity." As this makes him wet, he fails to ignite and, the next day, is thrown away into a ditch.

The Mystery of the Sea, a mystery novel by Bram Stoker, was originally published in 1902. Stoker is best known for his 1897 novel Dracula, but The Mystery of the Sea contains many of the same compelling elements. It tells the story of an Englishman living in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, who meets and falls in love with an American heiress. She is involved with the intrigues of the Spanish-American War, and a complex plot involving second sight, kidnapping, and secret codes unfolds over the course of the novel.

"The Secret Garden" is a short story by G. K. Chesterton. It was originally published in The Story-Teller in October, 1910. It is the second story in the collection The Innocence of Father Brown. It is the second story about the French detective Valentin and completes his plot arch, begun in The Blue Cross.

Neville St. Clair, a respectable businessman, has disappeared and his wife claims she saw him at the upper window of an opium den. Rushing upstairs to the room she found only a beggar who denied any knowledge of St. Clair – whose clothes are later found in the room, and his coat, laden with coins, in the River Thames outside the window. The beggar is arrested, but a few days later St. Clair's wife receives a letter from her husband.

Shortly after the death of renowned socialist theorist Karl Marx, the trustee of his estate, Friedrich Engels, approaches Sherlock Holmes for help. As the mourners arrive in London for Marx's funeral, a mystery unfolds that culminates in a showdown at Highgate Cemetery.

"Animal Farm" is Orwell’s classic satire of the Russian Revolution - an account of the bold struggle, initiated by the animals, that transforms Mr. Jones’s Manor Farm into Animal Farm - a wholly democratic society built on the credo that All Animals Are Created Equal. But are they?

The protagonist Beowulf, a hero of the Geats, comes to the aid of Hrothgar, king of the Danes, whose great hall, Heorot, is plagued by the monster Grendel. Beowulf kills Grendel with his bare hands, then kills Grendel's mother with a giant's sword that he found in her lair. Later in his life, Beowulf becomes king of the Geats, and finds his realm terrorized by a dragon, some of whose treasure had been stolen from his hoard in a burial mound.

A History of the Philippines is a short, dense and temporally expansive book. It starts with the Evolution of the Land 100 million years ago. The writing is predominantly dry, dispassionate and academic. It's full of details, and often presumes an existing familiarity with Philippine history and culture, introducing terms with no definition provided.

An Ideal Family is a 1921 short story written by Katherine Mansfield. The story circles around a man who is complimented about how perfect his family is, but he seems to think otherwise.

Predict, create, and realize your future you... now!The FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security - along with countless top corporations - use a proven scientific methodology known as "predictive modeling" to assess, predict, and prevent activities, with a 90% success rate. Now, in Future You, these same methods are available to you for the first time.

The Problem of Thor Bridge is a Sherlock Holmes murder mystery by Arthur Conan Doyle in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, first published in 1922 in The Strand Magazine. Neil Gibson, the Gold King and former Senator from "some Western state", approaches Holmes to investigate the murder of his wife Maria in order to clear his children's governess, Grace Dunbar, of the crime. It soon emerges that Mr. Gibson's marriage had been unhappy and he treated his wife very badly.

"The Man Who Would Be King" (1888) is a story by Rudyard Kipling about two British adventurers in British India who become kings of Kafiristan, a remote part of Afghanistan. The story was first published in The Phantom Rickshaw and other Eerie Tales (1888). It also appeared in Wee Willie Winkie and Other Child Stories (1895), and numerous later editions of that collection. It has been adapted for other media a number of times. The narrator of the story is an Indian journalist in 19th century India - Kipling himself, in all but name.

A stormy evening of olive and silver was closing in, as Father Brown, wrapped in a grey Scotch plaid, came to the end of a grey Scotch valley and beheld the strange castle of Glengyle. It stopped one end of the glen or hollow like a blind alley; and it looked like the end of the world. Rising in steep roofs and spires of seagreen slate in the manner of the old French-Scotch chateaux, it reminded an Englishman of the sinister steeple-hats of witches in fairy tales; and the pine woods that rocked round the green turrets looked, by comparison, as black as numberless flocks of ravens.