A departure from London’s normal tales of the frozen North, all of these tales take place in the islands of Hawaii. The tales deal with racial issues, family relationships, leprosy quarantines, missionaries, and the diverse people who make their homes on the beautiful Hawaiian islands. London traveled to Hawaii in the late 1800s and early 1900s, including an eight-month stay shortly before he died in 1916. He had a fondness for the islands that is apparent in the rich descriptions in these tales.

Burning Daylight begins as many of London's finest works begin: with the depiction of a man blessed with physical prowess and keen perception who takes on the natural forces of the 19th century Yukon. Supreme gold miner, risk-all gambler, and unbeatable fighter, Burning Daylight is his name. Daylight moves from the Yukon to San Francisco, and plays "the bigger game of finance and wealth," until he is reminded of something he lost, something pure and good....

Jack London's tales of man's struggle against the forces of nature are universally popular. Best known for his novels The Call of the Wild and White Fang, London was also a prolific writer of short stories. This collection brings together four of his finest, all depicting the harshness of life in the frozen arctic wastes.

"To Build a Fire," the best-known of Jack London's many short stories, tells the tale of a solitary traveler on the Yukon Trail accompanied only by his dog as they endure the extreme cold. A classic narrative of a battle for survival against the forces of nature, "To Build a Fire" is London at his best. Also included here are "The Red One," "All Gold Canyon," "A Piece of Steak," "The Love of Life," "Flush of Gold," "The Story of Keesh," and "The Wisdom of the Trail."

Martin Eden, Jack London’s semiautobiographical novel, is about a struggling young writer. It is considered by many to be the author’s most mature work. Personifying London’s own dreams of education and literary fame as a young man in San Francisco, Martin Eden’s impassioned but ultimately ineffective battle to overcome his bleak circumstances makes him one of the most memorable and poignant characters Jack London ever created.

Four tales of love and adventure in the Old West introduce a cast of characters that includes a brave Texas ranger who risks his life against avenging outlaws to rescue the woman he secretly loves; a beautiful seductress who comes between two brothers; a desperate fugitive who seeks sanctuary with a peace-loving people; and a daring young schoolteacher who journeys West to meet the man who has captured her heart. Included are "The Ranger", "Canyon Walls", "Avalanche", and "From Missouri".

After surviving the brutality of the First World War, Clifton Forrest returns home to find that his childhood home was stolen from his family. With his parents robbed of their property and the area under the firm control of his old acquaintance, Lundeen, Cliff must fight both his enemy and his ailing body to regain the right to a peaceful life on the land he once called home. The Shepherd of Guadaloupe tells of Cliff's heroic journey as he battles Lundeen while juggling his love for his parents and the love of Lundeen's daughter, Virginia.

C. S. Lewis's dazzling allegory about Heaven and Hell - and the chasm fixed between them - is one of his most brilliantly imaginative tales, where we discover that the gates of Hell are locked from the inside. In a dream, the narrator boards a bus on a drizzly afternoon in Hell and embarks on an incredible voyage to Heaven. Anyone in Hell is invited on board, and anyone may remain in Heaven if he or she so chooses. But do we really want to live in Heaven?

When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity. Cloning, feel-good drugs, anti-aging programs, and total social control through politics, programming, and media: has Aldous Huxley accurately predicted our future? With a storyteller's genius, he weaves these ethical controversies in a compelling narrative that dawns in the year 632 A.F. (After Ford, the deity). When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity.

Here are 10 unabridged stories by the greatest American authors. These treasured stories from the most influential authors of the 19th and early 20th centuries were selected for their literary importance as well as their dramatic oral qualities.

Jean Grayson is traveling alone to visit her sister out west when a terrible accident occurs and she is saved from certain death by a stranger. Together they make their perilous way through the wilderness. His name is Jasper Holt, and their care for each other blossoms on their journey. But Holt warns Jean that when they reach the safety of their destination, she'll find that her relatives and the townsfolk have nothing good to say about him.

When Sir Peter Pendragon, a retired pilot of the Great War, meets the free-spirited Louise, a devotee of the mysterious occultist Basil King Lamus, the two immediately get married and set off across Europe, on a drug-fueled honeymoon of heroin and cocaine. Eventually, in an attempt to break free of their recently acquired habit, the newlyweds find their way to the Abbey of Thelema in Italy, where the adults perform invocations to the sun and the children freely recite passages from the Book of the Law.

In a remote part of 19th-century Afghanistan, two British adventurers pursue their ambition to rule an empire. Using betrayal, threats, and guns, they win the respect of a primitive tribe and become worshipped as gods until one day they draw blood, and the game is up. "The Man Who Would Be King" is an action-packed tale about the pitfalls of colonialism and the temptations and evils of power.

In what many refer to as one of the first and greatest science fiction thrillers, a mysterious stranger wanders into an inn, wrapped head-to-toe in bandages. What lies beneath the bandages is something even more mysterious. As Wells tackles issues of identity, deception, and the deterioration of the human mind, listeners will be drawn into the story of the mysterious man, whose own mistakes end up whisking him into a whirlwind of deceit, terror, and even murder. In the end, the question will be asked: when your sense of self and identity vanish, who will you become?

It's 1871 in the contented Mormon town of Cottonwoods, Utah, and Elder Tull wants to marry wealthy rancher Jane Withersteen so desperately that he's willing to use the water supply - the precious lifeblood of the land - to force her hand. But that was before a mysterious, lone gunman called Lassiter showed up...

Owen Wister’s The Virginian pre-dates the classic novels of Zane Grey and Max Brand and is considered by many to be the original Western. Dedicated to Wister’s friend and fellow outdoorsman Theodore Roosevelt, this timeless tale almost single-handedly established the cowboy archetype in literature. A quiet, noble foreman of a Wyoming cattle ranch in the 1870s, the Virginian falls for pretty schoolteacher Molly Wood. But when a rival suitor challenges his honor, the Virginian struggles to make his beloved Molly understand the harsh justice of the West.

In this romantic and raw adventure set in the untamed wilderness of Wyoming of 1886, an anonymous college graduate ventures out west where he encounters gun fights, lynching, cattle rustlers, high-stake poker games, Indian attacks, and a brave, honest and imposing cowboy known simply as the Virginian. Presented as the archetypal, ideal hero of the "western" genre (which was novelized for the very first time in this same book), the Virginian, a foreman at Shiloh Ranch, carries a strong sense of justice.

Why was the redoubtable King Henry, an aborigine from Western Australia, killed during a thunderstorm in New South Wales? What was the feud that led to murder after nineteen long years had passed? And who was the woman who saw the murder and kept silent? This first story of Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, the half-aborigine detective, takes him to a sheep station in the Darling River bush country where he encounters those problems he understands so well... mixed blood and divided loyalties.

Martin Eden, Jack London’s semiautobiographical novel, is about a struggling young writer. It is considered by many to be the author’s most mature work. Personifying London’s own dreams of education and literary fame as a young man in San Francisco, Martin Eden’s impassioned but ultimately ineffective battle to overcome his bleak circumstances makes him one of the most memorable and poignant characters Jack London ever created.

Harry Destry was a rough-and-tumble fighter who never lost a battle. But after six years in jail for a robbery he didn't commit, he comes back a changed man. The townsfolk believe he's beaten. They think all the fight's gone right out of him. And that's exactly what Destry wants them to think....

The warning was inscribed on the entrance of the hidden tomb, forgotten for millennia in the sands of mystic Egypt. Then the archaeologists and grave robbers came in search of the fabled Jewel of Seven Stars, which they found clutched in the hand of the mummy. Few heeded the ancient warning, until all who came in contact with the Jewel began to die in a mysterious and violent way, with the marks of a strangler around their neck.

Jamie MacFarlane has returned a hero from the Great War but with a stubborn chest wound. The government has sent him to their new thermal springs hospital in California "where it was hoped that the brilliant sunshine, the fruits, and the clean air, the eternal summer of a beneficent land" would heal him. But nothing has worked, and with his parents now deceased and no one to care for him, it seems the next step is a camp rife with tuberculosis. Realizing this, Jamie begins his great adventure on foot toward the ocean.

When a carousing Englishman disgraces the consecrated effigy of Hanuman, a leprous "Silver Man" marks him with a hideous curse. The ensuing night brings new terrors to the house of the doomed man.

When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity. Cloning, feel-good drugs, anti-aging programs, and total social control through politics, programming, and media: has Aldous Huxley accurately predicted our future? With a storyteller's genius, he weaves these ethical controversies in a compelling narrative that dawns in the year 632 A.F. (After Ford, the deity). When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity.

Throughout a single day in 1892, John Shawnessy recalls the great moments of his life - from the battles of the Civil War to the politics of the Gilded Age, from the love affairs of his youth in Indiana to his homecoming as schoolteacher, husband, and father.

The works of Thomas Wolfe cemented his legacy as one of the very best of the American Southern writers. Wolfe's largely autobiographical novel features Eugene Gant, who pines for a more expansive life after being born to a father whose bouts of maniacal raving are fueled by a prodigious appetite for drink.

Edgar Allan Poe, the master of terror, wrote some of literature's most entertaining and influential short stories, works that invented or anticipated modern detective novels, science fiction, and the horror genre. Tales of Terror collects nine of Poe's best-loved stories, all performed in chilling, highly dramatic readings by Jack Foreman. This collection includes such classics as "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Pit and the Pendulum", "The Fall of the House of Usher", and what many consider his masterpiece, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."

Here are 10 unabridged stories by the greatest American authors. These treasured stories from the most influential authors of the 19th and early 20th centuries were selected for their literary importance as well as their dramatic oral qualities.

A Signature Performance: Kenneth Branagh plays this like a campfire ghost story, told by a haunted, slightly insane Marlow.

Freckles, a plucky young man, lands a job as a watchman for a lumber company that logs timber in a mysterious forest swamp called the Limberlost.