Showing results by narrator "Walter Zimmerman" in All Categories

This choice collection of spine tingling tales runs the gamut from slightly spooky to "I'm sleeping with all the lights on tonight!" A splendid grouping of tales from the pens of some of the great writers of the past. Enjoy these classic stories alone or with a friend, whenever your ears are free.

Tolstoy is primarily known for his impressively long novels, but he also wrote some wonderful short stories. This one, dealing with ambition and greed, has an unforgettable message.

Emile Zola, along with fellow novelists Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert, was an early realist in French literature. In novels such as Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Zola's Nana, sex and violence were examined with vivid clarity. These realists soon adopted the word naturalism to describe their writings.

A literary giant of the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson made lasting contributions to English literature as an essayist, moralist, poet, biographer, literary critic and editor. His philosophical novella Rasselas became so popular that it was translated into five languages. A new English edition was published every year and even today there are multiple print editions available.

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 near Dorchester in that part of England he called Wessex. With stories sometimes from his own imagination and sometimes from local tradition, Hardy's work, like Dickens and Trollope, creates a strong sense of mood and location. Hardy hoped to be remembered for his poetry, but ours is not a poetic age. Thus his claim to a new generation of readers rests on his prose. There are great similarities between his era, a time of challenge, and our own.

The Phantom of the Opera is a Gothic novel, combining romance, horror, mystery, and tragedy. The story is about a mysterious figure who terrorizes a Paris opera house for the unwitting benefit of a young singer he loves.

"A Scandal in Bohemia" was the first of Arthur Conan Doyle's 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories to be published in The Strand Magazine. Holmes did not think much of the "fair sex" until the met a character in this story, Irene Adler, who became to him "the woman".

Dostoevsky is primarily known for his monumental works like Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. However, he also wrote many excellent shorter works that embody the same exploration of human psychology on a smaller scale. The Dream of a Ridiculous Man is one of his best short pieces. No less a writer than Virginia Woolf says of Dostoevsky, "Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading."

In this Poe-like tale, set in "an old gray house", a man exacts a bizarre revenge on his unfaithful wife and her lover. This chilling story is one of Balzac's most popular.

No one plumbs deeper depths of the psyche than French and Russian authors. This second wide-ranging collection of 19th-century literary masterworks, presented in their entirety, not only entertains, but provides insight into 19th-century mores and the mysteries of human nature.

Watson visits Sherlock Holmes at Christmastime and finds him contemplating a battered old hat, brought to him by the commissionaire Peterson after it and a Christmas goose had been dropped by a man in a scuffle with some street ruffians. Peterson takes the goose home to eat it, but comes back later with a precious carbuncle that his wife found in the bird's crop.

Nathaniel Hawthorne has taken some of the most striking and exciting Greek legends and adapted them for young readers. In this retelling, Hawthorne maintains the conceptions held by the original authors. This collection includes "The Minotaur", "The Pygmies", "The Dragon's Teeth", "Circe's Palace", "The Pomegranate Seeds", and "The Golden Fleece".

Honore de Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He was a keen observer of detail and presented in his stories an unfiltered representation of society. He is known for his multi-faceted characters. Even his lesser characters are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. Christ In Flanders is a story of faith..and a miracle.

In the wonderful fairy tale, Charles Dickens creates a number of memorable characters, including a King, who also has a regular office job and is always running out of money, his lovely wife, the Queen and their 17 children, as well as an elderly and very cranky fairy who gives their eldest daughter a magic fishbone she can use to grant one wish. However it will only work if the "circumstances are right".

Hamlin Garland is mostly remembered today for his innovative collections of short stories; Main Travelled Roads is his most famous collection. It contains six stories and is an undisputed American classic.

"The Lady, or the Tiger?" (1882) is about a man sentenced to an unusual punishment for having a romance with a king's beloved daughter. Taken to the public arena, he is faced with two doors, behind one of which is a hungry tiger that will devour him. Behind the other is a beautiful lady-in-waiting, whom he will have to marry, if he finds her.

Volume 5 of this popular series consists of the following stories: "The Books of Beasts" by Edith Nesbit, "Prince Sneeze" by Henry Beston, "Kind Little Edmund" by Edith Nesbit, "The Plate of Pancakes" by Maude Lindsey, "The Castle of Life" by Edward Deboulyea, "The Glass Dog" by L. Frank Baum, "The Country Called Nanomia" by Evelyn Sharp, "The Sea Dragon" by Alan McCall, "The Professor of Practical Jokes" by Evelyn Sharp...

Machiavelli cut his political teeth during the Renaissance, a time of intense hatred between Italian city states. Machiavelli was a man of action, a devout patriot. He wrote The Prince to describe how a leader could unite Italy and put a stop to the senseless conflict. This edition includes an addenda and Machiavelli's biography of Castruccio Castracani: his archetypal prince.

A Christmas Carol is undoubtedly the most famous supernatural story in English. However, it was not the only supernatural story of the season that Charles Dickens wrote. In Victorian England, Christmas was the time to explore the supernatural in stories, and Charles Dickens was one of the best at it. Included in this volume are a full-cast dramatization of A Christmas Carol, plus three more of Dickens' best stories of the season.

Guy de Maupassant is considered one of the fathers of the modern short story as well as one of the form's finest writers. His stories are characterized by their economy of style and efficient, seemingly effortless dénouements