Showing results by narrator "Edward Miller" in All Categories

"Fables for the Frivolous" is one of the earliest works by the American parodist Guy Wetmore Carryl. These fables are adapted from Jean de la Fontaine's original writings. The Aesop-style fables are written in verse, and are light-hearted retellings of fables from two centuries before, each ending with a moral and a pun. Among the more celebrated of the fables are "The Persevering Tortoise" and the "Pretentious Hare", "The Arrogant Frog" and the "Superior Bull", and "The Sycophantic Fox" and "The Gullible Raven".

"Lady Windermere's Fan" is a four-act comedy by Oscar Wilde. The play was first published in 1893. Like many of Wilde's comedies, it bitingly satirizes the morals of society. The story concerns Lady Windermere, who suspects that her husband is having an affair with another woman. She confronts him with it but although he denies it, he invites the other woman, Mrs. Erlynne, to his wife's birthday ball... The best-known line of the play sums up the central theme.

"The Willows" is one of Blackwood's best-known works and has been influential on a number of later writers. Horror author H. P. Lovecraft considered it to be the finest supernatural tale in English literature. The work is an example of early modern horror and is connected within the literary tradition of weird fiction. Two friends are midway on a canoe trip down the Danube River.

"The Thing in the Attic" is a sci-fi story by James B. Blish, published in 1954. "Honath and his fellow arch-doubters did not believe in the Giants, and for this they were cast into Hell. And when survival depended upon unwavering faith in their beliefs, they saw that there were Giants, after all..." A classic and exotic tale of survival against all odds and amongst - yes - real space giants!

"The Man Who Found Out (A Nightmare)" is a chilling horror short story. A researcher embarks upon an expedition to find "The Tablet of the Gods", which have haunted his dreams since his childhood. Our hero discovers more than he bargained for. A lot more.

"A Book of Nonsense" is a volume of limericks by author Edward Lear, published in 1846. Containing over a hundred hilarious verses suitable for both children and non-children; the author was a key figure in popularizing the form! Here is a delightful sample: "There was a young fellow named Tate Who dined with his girl, at 8.08 But I'd hate to relate What that fellow named Tate And his tête-à-tête ate at 8.08."

A dizzyingly intricately plotted sci-fi story bursting with action, suspense, numerous space creatures, challenges and conundrums; beings living outside time, a stunningly beautiful but frightfully ambitious tri-D woman, Giant frogs taking on aliens, a weary space pilot... How explosive will this mix be?!

This chilling masterpiece by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1841, has been recognized as the world's first modern detective story(!). C. Auguste Dupin is a man in Paris who tries to solve the mystery of the brutal murder of two women. Numerous witnesses heard a suspect, though no one agrees on what language was spoken. At the murder scene, Dupin finds a hair that does not appear to be human.

The Emperor's New Clothes is a story about two weavers who promise an emperor a new suit of clothes that is invisible to those who are unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent... The Emperor's ministers cannot see the clothes themselves, but pretend that they can for fear of appearing unfit for their positions and the Emperor does the same. Andersen altered the source tale to direct the focus on courtly pride and intellectual vanity. The tale has been translated into over 100 languages.

"The Happy Prince and Other Tales" (sometimes called "The Happy Prince and Other Stories") is a collection of stories for children by Oscar Wilde, first published in May 1888. It contains five stories: The Happy Prince, The Nightingale and the Rose, The Selfish Giant, The Devoted Friend, and The Remarkable Rocket... All of them are suffused with the author's world famous humor and intelligence; but also with fantastical elements such as a princely statue who can see, a heroic swallow and an actual giant!

"Sentiment, Inc." is a sci-fi short story by Poul William Anderson, published in 1957. The work chillingly explores themes of thought-manipulation in interpersonal relationships. What if you could control and alter associations and viewpoints of the human mind? What about the eventual consequences?

"Planet of Dread" is an outer space horror story. It tells the tale of a spaceship with one too many passengers - a stowaway. The stowaway is given two choices: be sentenced to death, or be marooned on a nearby planet. He chooses to be marooned. His one problem is that the planet is crawling with millions of giant insect monstrosities! By master of the genre Murray Leinster. Published in 1930.

A spaceship is attacked by a mysterious sphere, a defense mechanism belonging to the planet that the spaceship has been surveying. The spaceship wins the battle with the sphere but is badly damaged, as well as the crew. They land on the strange planet for repairs and encounter humanoid life forms with advanced telepathic abilities. The humanoids seem friendly, but are they to be trusted ultimately...?

"The Golden Goose Book" is a wonderful classic of children's fairy tales by L. Leslie Brooke, first published in 1905. It includes the mostly universally well known and well loved tales "The Golden Goose", "The Three Bears", "The Three Little Pigs" and "Tom Thumb"... Time to listen up in delight and rediscover these timeless classics!

"I Was A Teen-Age Secret Weapon" is a very funny sci-fi story by Richard Sabia. A 1950's American teenager gets care-taking work at a psychological laboratory. In there, one scientist discovers that the teenager is the first human capable of causing others to be accident-prone, but that this is only possible in cases of crisis. The scientist sends our hero Dolliver Wims straight to War... recipe for hilarious disaster?

"The Jungle Book" is a wonderful collection of stories by world famous English author Rudyard Kipling. The original publications contain illustrations, some by the author's father, John Lockwood Kipling. The tales in the book are fables, using animals in an anthropomorphic manner to give moral lessons. The best-known of them are the three stories revolving around the adventures of Mowgli, an abandoned "man cub" who is raised by wolves in the Indian jungle.

"The Chapter Ends" is a sci-fi story set tens of thousands of years in the future. What is the primary concern here is quite simply the end of human habitation on Earth and some serious decision making on what to do next... The author makes some very interesting and deep observations about human and cultural evolution.

A sci-fi/war classic by the master Murray Leinster, published in 1930. Great sci-fi in the way Leinster guesses (or predicts) what will be a large part of future warfare... "The persistent, oily smell of fog-gas was everywhere, even in the little pill-box. Outside, all the world was blotted out by the thick gray mist that went rolling slowly across country with the breeze. The noises that came through it were curiously muted - fog-gas mutes all noises somewhat - but somewhere to the right artillery was pounding something with H E shell.

"A Slave Is a Slave" is a story by sci-fi master H. Beam Piper, published in 1962. A slave based society is overtaken by a bigger power that outlaws slavery... "Something everybody owns, nobody owns, Mykhyl Eschkhaffar objected. 'Oh, no, Mykhyl; it will belong to everybody,' KhreggorChmidd told him earnestly. 'But somebody will have to take care of it for everybody. That,' he added complacently, 'will be you and me and the rest of us here'." Thought provoking and exciting all at once!

"The K-Factor" is a sci-fi story by author Harry Harrison, published in 1960. A K-factor is a so called "war factor", more precisely a name of an atomic file that can be used in two ways, as with an atomic bomb. Neel Sidorak, our hero, and his team has to constantly guard Earth's safety, as Earth had settled quite a few planets... Thought provoking and entertaining in equal measure!