Showing results for "The Image" in Classics

King Lear is perhaps the most poignant character in literature. The aged, abused monarch is at once the consummate figure of authority and the classic example of the fall from majesty. He is widely agreed to be William Shakespeare's most moving, tragic hero. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Lear with wisdom, joy, exuberance, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character.

"Hector Hugh Munro (18 December 1870 - 14 November 1916), better known by the pen name Saki, and also frequently as H. H. Munro, was a British writer whose witty, mischievous, and sometimes macabre stories satirize Edwardian society and culture. He is considered a master of the short story, and often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker." (Wikipedia)

Two outcasts seemed well suited to each other. While one is a carved image no one likes, the other is a songbird that receives no welcome. This classic short story from Saki embraces the notion that each of us need others and that the joy we find is often in the seeking and finding of another. Narrated by Glenn Hascall.

"Crime and Punishment" opens in 1860s St. Petersburg, where Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, an impoverished former student, has come psychologically unhinged. He wanders about the city, barely eats, and hatches a vague plan he wishes to "test" one afternoon. He goes to the apartment of an old pawnbroker, who lives with her sister Lizaveta, and pawns his father's watch. Upon leaving, he repeats to himself his intentions: he will murder the old crone and rob her.

Probably the most famous of Edith Wharton's novels, Ethan Frome contrasts sharply with her usual ironic contemplation of the fashionable New York society to which she herself belonged and whose strengths and weaknesses she understood so well. Ethan Frome is a keenly-etched portrait of the simple inhabitants of a 19th-century New England village.