Uniting universal themes with a wonderfully personal vision of the world, Hans Christian Andersen found magic in the landscape of childhood. His talking animals and living toys shine a sparkling light on the strange wisdom of innocence and the deceptive nature of adulthood. These stories have now been adapted into countless classic films (including The Little Mermaid, The Red Shoes, and Frozen - which was based on “The Snow Queen”) and have become part of our everyday speech, such as when we talk about “ugly ducklings” and “the emperor’s new clothes.”

This original compilation from Skyboat Media features the most inventive and poetic of Alexander Pushkin’s short fiction. Exposed to French culture at a young age, Pushkin’s work reflects these sensibilities, and he combines this with stories of his Russian ancestors that his grandmother would relate to him and his siblings during their summers near Moscow.

The complete "box set" of T. H. White's epic fantasy novel of the Arthurian legend. The novel is made up of five parts: "The Sword in the Stone", "The Witch in the Wood", "The Ill-Made Knight", "The Candle in the Wind", and "The Book of Merlyn".

One evening in 1951, an itinerant storyteller arrives unannounced at a house in the Irish countryside. In exchange for a bed and a warm meal, he invites his hosts and their neighbors to join him by the wintry fireside and begins to tell formative stories of Ireland's history. Ronan, a nine-year-old boy, grows so entranced by the storytelling that, when the old man leaves abruptly under mysterious circumstances, the boy devotes himself to finding him again.

If you can count on one thing from "Madea" Mabel Simmons, star of Diary of a Mad Black Woman and Madea's Family Reunion, it's that she's got something to say. She's the beloved, hilarious, sharp-witted, pistol-packing grandmother who's watching out and speaking her mind. Now Madea is telling her own story, dishing her memoirs and hard-won, hilarious wisdom in her own inimitable voice (with a little help from her friend Tyler Perry).

In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview 86-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage 50 years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile.

Dust Tracks on a Road is the bold, poignant, and funny autobiography of novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, one of American literature's most compelling and influential authors. Hurston's powerful novels of the South - including Jonah's Gourd Vine and, most famously, Their Eyes Were Watching God - continue to enthrall readers with their lyrical grace, sharp detail, and captivating emotionality.

When Alice tumbles down, down, down a rabbit-hole one hot summer's afternoon in pursuit of a White Rabbit, she finds herself in Wonderland. And there begin the fantastical adventures that will see her experiencing extraordinary changes in size, swimming in a pool of her own tears, and attending the very maddest of tea parties.

Meet Rabo Karabekian, a moderately successful surrealist painter who we meet late in life and see struggling (like all of Vonnegut's key characters) with the dregs of unresolved pain and the consequences of brutality. Loosely based on the legend of Bluebeard (best realized in Bela Bartok's one-act opera), the novel follows Karabekian through the last events in his life that is heavy with women, painting, artistic ambition, artistic fraudulence, and as of yet unknown consequence.

This first novel in The Deptford Trilogy introduces Ramsay, a man who returns from World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross but who is destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As we hear Ramsey tell his story, we begin to realize that, from childhood, he has influenced those around him in a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious way.

What do you do when you discover information that is before its time? What do you do when your curiosity takes you on an adventure that is so bizarre that there is nothing normal to relate to? This is what happened to Dolores Cannon in 1968, long before she began her career as a past-life hypnotherapist and regressionist. Travel back with us to that time when the words reincarnation, past-lives, regression, walk-ins, New Age were unknown to the general population.

Here you will find the complete novels of Mark Twain: 1. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Starts at Chapter 1, 2. The Prince and the Pauper Starts at Chapter 37, 3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Starts at Chapter 70, 4. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court Starts at Chapter 113, 5. The American Claimant Starts at Chapter 158, 6. Tom Sawyer Abroad Starts at Chapter 184, 7. Pudd'nhead Wilson Starts at Chapter 197, 8. Tom Sawyer, Detective Starts at Chapter 219, 9. A Horse's Tale Starts at Chapter 230, 10. The Mysterious Stranger Starts at Chapter 245.

In this audiobook, the author of Seven Gothic Tales gives a true account of her life on her plantation in Kenya. She tells with classic simplicity of the ways of the country and the natives; of the beauty of the Ngong Hills and coffee trees in blossom; of her guests, from the Prince of Wales to Knudsen, the old charcoal burner, who visited her; of primitive festivals; of big game that were her near neighbors - lions, rhinos, elephants, zebras, buffaloes; and of Lulu, the little gazelle who came to live with her, unbelievably ladylike and beautiful.

Walter Starbuck, a career humanist and eventual low-level aide in the Nixon White House, is implicated in Watergate and jailed, after which he (like Howard Campbell in Mother Night) works on his memoirs. Starbuck is innocent (his office was used as a base for the Watergate shenanigans of which he had no knowledge), and yet he is not innocent (he has collaborated with power unquestioningly and served societal order all his life). He represents another Vonnegut Everyman caught amongst forces he neither understands nor can defend.

Born into a respected Irish-Anglo family in 1860, Charles loves his native land and its long-suffering but irrepressible people. As a healer, he travels the countryside dispensing traditional cures while soaking up stories and legends of bygone times - and witnessing the painful, often violent birth of land-reform measures destined to lead to Irish independence. At the age of 40, summoned to Paris to treat his dying countryman - the infamous Oscar Wilde - Charles experiences the fateful moment of his life.