The Brass Bottle
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Narrated by:
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John Rayburn
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By:
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F. Anstey
About this listen
The Brass Bottle is the story of an architect who bought an antique brass bottle to give to a professor dealing in Mideast antiquities. After the purchase, the architect’s curiosity was aroused, and he removed the stopper in the bottle. And when he did, a big cloud of smoke was released, producing a major surprise when a genie emerged. His name was Fakrash el-Aamash, and he turned out to be a fairy-tale-type character who wound up trying to repay the architect, Horace Ventimore, for giving him release from what amounted to a brass prison. A series of hijinks of one kind or another were the result.
Nearly two decades before, the author had written a somewhat jumbled and disorganized novel titled Vice Versa, about a father somehow making a switch with his schoolboy son. There was considerable popular success, but that created a problem for author Thomas Anstey Guthrie: He actually wanted to write a serious novel and penned The Giant’s Robe. It was not a success - one critic called it “very poor stuff” - and it was obvious the public insisted on regarding Guthrie (penname F. Anstey) as a humorist. That worked out better as he became an impressive staff member of Punch magazine.
Almost seven decades later, an American movie adaptation of The Brass Bottle was made. Ironically, one of the stars was Barbara Eden just before she starred as “Jeannie” in the TV series I Dream of Jeannie. How’s that for type-casting? It makes it even more interesting to hear the story that perhaps brought about that success.
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Story
From Boston's social underworld emerges Verena Tarrant, a girl with extraordinary oratorical gifts, which she deploys in tawdry meeting-houses on behalf of "the sisterhood of women." She acquires two admirers of a very different stamp: Olive Chancellor, devotee of radical causes and marked out for tragedy; and Basil Ransom, a veteran of the Civil War who holds rigid views concerning society and women's place therein. Is the lovely, lighthearted Verena made for public movements or private passions?
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Fantastic reading!
- By FranceyO on 07-15-11
By: Henry James
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Can You Forgive Her?
- By: Anthony Trollope
- Narrated by: Timothy West
- Length: 28 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Can You Forgive Her? is the first of the six in the Palliser series. Trollope inextricably binds together the issues of parliamentary election and marriage, of politics and privacy. The values and aspirations of the governing stratum of Victorian society are ruthlessly examined, and none remains unscathed. But above all Trollope focuses on the predicament of women. 'What should a woman do with her life?' asks Alice Vavasor of herself, and this theme is echoed by every other woman in the audiobook.
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Superb performance and sound
- By David on 05-21-10
By: Anthony Trollope
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Man and Wife
- By: Wilkie Collins
- Narrated by: Nicolas Boulton
- Length: 23 hrs
- Unabridged
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Published 10 years after Collins’s most popular novel The Woman in White, Man and Wife centres on the confused and inequitable marriage laws of 19th-century Britain, reflecting the author’s own antipathy toward the institution. The plot follows the fortunes of a woman who, committed to marriage with one man, comes to believe that she may have inadvertently married his friend, according to the archaic laws of Scotland and Ireland.
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Intricate plot, good dialogue, desperately needed an editor
- By Seth on 07-25-21
By: Wilkie Collins
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Dead Souls
- By: Nikolai Gogol, C. J. Hogarth - translator
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 15 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in a provincial town and visits a succession of landowners to make each a strange offer. He proposes to buy the names of dead serfs still registered on the census, saving their owners from paying tax on them, and to use these "souls" as collateral to reinvent himself as a gentleman. In this ebullient masterpiece, Nikolai Gogol created a grotesque gallery of human types.
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Captures absurdity of mid 19th century Russia
- By Darwin8u on 10-26-12
By: Nikolai Gogol, and others
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El conde de Montecristo [The Count of Monte Cristo]
- By: Alejandro Dumas
- Narrated by: Joan M Martinez
- Length: 46 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Ésta es sin duda, la novela de aventuras más famosa de la historia de la literatura. El joven Edmundo Dantés llega al puerto de Marsella, feliz por poder ver a Mercedes, de la que está enamorado. Pero otros pretendientes de Mercedes, van a hacerle la vida imposible, consiguiendo que el mismo día de la boda sea detenido, acusado de traición al rey y enviado directamente a la terrible prisión del castillo de If.
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Qué bonita historia y que gran narración.
- By Luis Enrique Cuevas Hernández on 02-14-21
By: Alejandro Dumas
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Middlemarch
- By: George Eliot
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 35 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Dorothea Brooke is an ardent idealist who represses her vivacity and intelligence for the cold, theological pedant Casaubon. One man understands her true nature: the artist Will Ladislaw. But how can love triumph against her sense of duty and Casaubon’s mean spirit? Meanwhile, in the little world of Middlemarch, the broader world is mirrored: the world of politics, social change, and reforms, as well as betrayal, greed, blackmail, ambition, and disappointment.
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Best Audible book ever
- By Molly-o on 12-25-11
By: George Eliot
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Le Pere Goriot
- By: Honoré de Balzac
- Narrated by: Paul Hecht
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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At the shabby boarding house in the rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, petty Madame Vauquer and her tenants wonder at the plight of the aging resident Goriot. Once a well-heeled merchant, Goriot was, at first, afforded special treatment from the Madame. But now something is clearly amiss in his financial affairs, and his increasingly tawdry appearance makes him a subject of ridicule in the household.
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balzac rocks
- By beatrice on 03-12-10
By: Honoré de Balzac
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Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon
- By: Jane Austen
- Narrated by: Norma West
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Previously unpublished in unabridged audio, these three works (one novel unpublished in her lifetime and two unfinished fragments) reveal Jane Austen's development as a great artist.
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For the Austen Addict
- By Joseph R on 09-09-09
By: Jane Austen
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Something New
- By: P. G. Wodehouse
- Narrated by: B.J. Harrison
- Length: 8 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Here, we have a glorious ensemble of Woodhousian characters knocking elbows to foreheads in the elegant and grand Blandings Castle. Meet Freddy Threepwood, the vagrant son of doddering old Lord Emsworth of Blandings Castle. Freddy has recently become engaged to Aline Peters, the American heiress of an irascible father. The snag is that Freddy seems to have at one point become enamored of a struggling actress, Joan Valentine, and written some impetuous and imprudent letters to her.
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Same book as Something Fresh
- By customer on 03-07-15
By: P. G. Wodehouse