Showing results by author "Jack London" in All Categories

Experience first-hand the dramatic ebb and flow of emotion as classic literature is transformed into the world of your imagination like never before. After being separated from his partner in the lonely tundra of Canada, one man struggles to survive an unforgettable journey through time, hunger, and insanity.

 An entrancing collection of 50 great short stories by leading classic writers.  

Jack London’s Call of the Wild is a beautiful tale of Buck, a house dog torn from the comforts of hearth and home in sunny California and thrust into the unforgiving wild. Through Buck, London takes us on a journey where the shackles of civilization are left behind, leading us to a simultaneously unknown and familiar past. Forgotten senses are awakened and survival is key. The story awakens in us something primal - the desire to be truly free.

In 1906, without studying navigation, Jack London, his wife Charmian, and a small crew sail to the South Pacific, hoping not to get lost. His adventures and misadventures at sea led him through native uprisings, The Doldrums, and the then unknown sport of surfing. This first person narrative, in its first recording as an audiobook, combines London’s spirit of adventure with his wonderful sense of humor.

Twelve billionaires rule the United States, while those called freemen are forced to serve the rich. But that was 60 years ago, before the Scarlet Plague. In this post-apocalyptic novella, a ragged and tattered old man tells his progeny of what life was like before The Scarlet Plague appeared - and wiped out civilization as they knew it.

Jack London gained his first and most lasting fame as the author of tales of the Klondike gold rush. This, his first collection of stories, draws on his experience in the Yukon. The stories tell of gambles won and lost, of endurance and sacrifice, and often turn on the qualities of exceptional women and on the relations between the white adventurers and the native tribes. Stories included are: "The white Silence," "The Son of the Wolf," "The Men of Forty Mile," "In a Far Country," "To the Man on Trail," "The Priestly Perogative," "The Wisdom of the Trail," "The Wife of the King.""An Odyssey of the North."

Here is one of London's famous stories of the Klondike, where men had to battle the elements, and often each other, to survive.

Jack London is among the greatest adventure writers in American Literature, and The Call of the Wild is his masterpiece, a work that takes us where few tales have dared: into the mind of an animal. Buck is taken from the warmth of the Santa Clara valley to work as a sled-dog in the frozen Yukon during the Gold Rush. There he is forced to lose his domesticated ways and rediscover his natural instincts.

Experience a masterpiece of American literature in audio! The Call of the Wild, considered by many London's greatest novel, is a gripping tale of a heroic dog that, thrust into the brutal life of the Alaska Gold Rush, ultimately faces a choice between living in man's world and returning to nature.

In The Road, Jack London embraces the concepts of unconfined individualism and Darwinism through his autobiographical account of his time riding the rails of Canada and the United States. The author of White Fang, The Call of the Wild, and Sea Wolf, relays the time leading up to turning point in his life - a perfunctory trial and a 30-day imprisonment in the Erie County Penitentiary for the crime of vagrancy - an experience so degrading that he turned to a career in writing.

Jack London's masterpiece, tells the gripping tale of a dog named Buck who is wrenched out of his life of ease and luxury to become a sled dog in Alaska. Drawing on his wolf heritage, Buck must fight for survival in an alien environment.

Humphrey van Weyden led a privileged existence during his early life, but suddenly finds himself cast into the sea, fighting for survival. Pitted against ruthless captain Wolf Larsen, van Weyden's courage and determination allows him to fight adversity and learn valuable lessons along the way, in this American classic originally published in 1904.

Here is one of London's famous stories of the Klondike, where men had to battle the elements, and often each other, to survive.

Selected Shorts is an award-winning series of classic and contemporary short fiction read by acclaimed actors. The readings are recorded live at Peter Norton Symphony Space in New York City. The Selected Shorts radio series is a co-production of Symphony Space and WNYC, New York Public Radio, and is heard on public radio stations nationwide.

The greatest short story writers strive to achieve a single, dramatic effect, a feature which the early masters of this genre perfected. Although the short story came from Europe, it was reborn in America and reached a pinnacle of superb form on these shores by the turn of the 20th century. In so many of our best writers, we hear echoes of a pioneer ethos that sustains the heart of a great literature. Here are 12 of America's best.

Buck is living the good life in the soft South, when he is snatched and transported to the savagery of the Northland, where the Klondike gold rush has brought out rough basic instincts of survival in men - and dogs. He adjusts to the gruelling regime of a sled dog, which almost kills him, but he survives to find a new and fulfilling way of life. The Call of the Wild is not only a classic 'ripping yarn', but also an enduring masterpiece of the inescapable laws of nature.

When Humphrey Van Weyden finds himself struggling in the freezing waters of San Francisco Bay, he thinks the worst that can happen to him is drowning. After he is rescued by the Ghost and its captain, Wolf Larson, Humphrey discovers that there are fates far worse than death. On Larsen's hell-ship, the dilettante hero is forced to slave as cabin boy and humble seaman. And over the seven months' voyage to the sealing grounds off Siberia, he engages in an epic duel with his ruthlessly Nietzschean skipper.

Torn by a quirk of fate from his life as a dilettante and intellectual, Humphrey van Weydon finds himself at the whim of the ruthless Wolf Larsen. The 2 men - the one youthful, idealistic, and upper-class, the other ruthless, dangerous, self-taught, and self-determined - inevitably become adversaries. As he does in Call of the Wild and White Fang, Jack London dramatizes in this story the violent encounter between safe, genteel comfort and a brutal set of circumstances.

Humphrey Van Weyden finds himself the captive voyager aboard the Ghost, captained by the brutal and barbaric Wolf Larsen. The desperate character of Van Weyden's voyage is defined by the fact that he is out of his element, in unimaginable peril, and the slave of this cynical and wild soul, Larsen. Almost immediately, the slave plots his freedom - and must confront the weakness in his soul, mind and body.

This is the first line in this tale of a man uprooted and thrust into the unfamiliar and dangerous world of the sealing sailor. Humphrey Van Weyden, a San Francisco sophisticate and an intellectual, finds himself the captive voyager aboard The Ghost, captained by the brutal and barbaric Wolf Larsen. Van Weyden’s rights disappear as the coast of California vanishes over the horizon.