Showing results for "The Well Life" in Classics

The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Never more so than in this collection of 30 weird and macabre tales.

Mr. Hoopdriver is a frustrated draper’s assistant in Putney, London. He is badly paid, over-worked, and he needs a holiday. He also owns a bicycle—though he is an awkward rider. When his annual ten days’ holiday comes around, Mr. Hoopdriver sets out on a bicycling tour of the “Southern Coast.” Wells wrote this at the height of the bicycling craze and before the automobile. The bicycle gave freedom to the working class, weakened the English class structure and gave a boost to female emancipation. In his story he explores these changes.

H.G. Wells is best known for his science fiction, but some of his greatest works were in other genres. "The Passionate Friends" is a love story. It also is a story about dreams, despair, jealousy, sex, the struggle against social convention, the future of civilization, and much much more. It is written by a father to his son, "not indeed to the child you are now, but to the man you are going to be." He writes it so that one day, perhaps when he is dead, his grown son can read it and rediscover him as a friend and equal.

Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States is an 1853 novel by the author and playwright William Wells Brown. Set in the early 19th century, it is the story of Clotel and her sister Althesa, who are fictional slave daughters of Thomas Jefferson. It is considered the first novel published by an African American and explores the destructive effects of slavery on African American families, the difficult lives of mixed-race people, and the degraded and immoral condition of the relationship between master and slave.

A man builds a time machine and tells his dinner guests that he can travel through time. He leaves from dinner in his machine for three hours and has adventures that include going back in time hundreds of years and forward in time millions of years, where he finds strange and dangerous places from which he is lucky to escape from. He returns and tells them of his adventures and shows proof of his travels by providing strange items from his pocket.

An extraterrestrial alien attack from Mars takes place outside London, England in the late 1800s. The aliens are big, grey, and rather ugly. They invade using very large tripod warships. The citizen and military defense has some measure of success, but, ultimately, the aliens prevail and traverse the land unimpeded. This audio classic novel has been carefully abridged and adapted into 10 short, easy-to-understand chapters. This format enables listeners of all ages and English language abilities to understand and enjoy the story.

A man dressed in a long coat with bandages covering his face arrives in a small village and does not engage much in conversation. While striving to maintain his privacy, he receives what he calls his luggage, yet in reality is chemicals and laboratory supplies, thereby furthering the mystery around himself. Eventually, he reveals his name to be Griffin and later runs into Mr. Kemp, a former student from medical school. Griffin creates a diabolical plan after recounting to Kemp how he is able to create invisibility.