Showing results by narrator "Walter Zimmerman" in All Categories

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.

"The Bet" is one of Chekov's most anthologized stories. A rich banker makes a bet with a poor artist that he cannot voluntarily stay imprisoned for a long period of time. The result of the bet is quite different than either man could have supposed.

This is the original classic story of Bram Stoker's undead monster. It has influenced Western portrayals (including Buffy and Angel) of vampires and vampirism for nearly a century. Even after all this time, Bram Stoker's Dracula remains the undisputed masterpiece of horror writing.

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."

This is the story of the celebrated Pickwick Club. The members are to report to the club on their journeys, adventures, and observations of characters and manners. Dickens creates a vivid picture of England in taking his characters along the nostalgic highways and byways of this majestic isle. This remarkable first novel made Dickens famous and has remained one of the world's best-known works.

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".

The Gambler brilliantly captures the strangely powerful compulsion to bet that Dostoevsky, himself a compulsive gambler, knew so well. The hero rides an emotional roller coaster between exhilaration and despair, and secondary characters such as the grandmother, who throws much of her fortune away at the gaming tables, are unforgettable.

Pushkin was one of the giants of 19th century Russian literature but, unlike Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, he was most famous for his short stories. The Shot, one of his most anthologized, tells the story of a terrible revenge.

If you are looking for advice on money, health, or happy living, look no further than this collection of wisdom from the sages. An extensive gathering of advice from learned men and women throughout the ages.

W. H. Hudson was born in 1841 in Buenos Aires and seems to have been a sort of permanently displaced person. He moved to London in 1869 and wrote a series of remarkable books, most with a wilderness setting. In 1904, when he was 63, he focused on an Indian legend for Green Mansions, a memorable romance of the jungle for which he is now chiefly remembered. His epitaph reads, "He Loved Birds and Green Places and the Wind on the Heath, and Saw Brightness of the Skirts of God."

This is a selection from Kipling's The Second Jungle Book.

"O. Henry" is the pen name of American writer William Sydney Porter whose short stories are known for their wit, warm characterization and clever, unexpected endings. The Princess and the Puma is one of porter's best, and most anthologized stories.

A rather unattractive itinerant flute-player and music copyist is sent away on Christmas Eve - causing a family to feel uncomfortably guilty. Lagerlof was a Swedish novelist, who in 1909 became the first woman writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Her work is deeply rooted in Nordic legends and history.

In this story, an old witch takes pity on a poor soldier and gives him a box with remarkable powers. As a result, he has many astounding adventures.

The Four Million was written in 1906 when roughly four million people lived in New York City. It opens with a reference to Ward McAllister's "assertion that there were only "400" people in New York City who were really worth noticing.

"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.

Via a series of letters between himself and a friend, a man falls in love with a woman he has never met - and receives a shocking surprise when he travels to meet her.

This is a collection of tales of the California Gold Rush era by the Western author, Bret Harte. It's a mix of local color, drama, and humor. Several film versions of "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" have been made, and John Payne and Ronald Reagan starred in an adaptation of "Tennessee's Partner" in 1955. The spaghetti Western Four of the Apocalypse is based on "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" and "The Luck of Roaring Camp".

Saladin Foster and his wife, Electra, are jolted out of their tranquility by the stunning news that a distant relative has left them $30,000. The one condition is that the couple must be able to prove "that they had taken no notice of the gift by spoken word or by letter, had made no inquiries concerning the [ship] Moribund's progress toward the everlasting tropics, and had not attended the funeral." This condition leads to some major difficulties.

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.