1000 Years of Laughter (Short Story)
Laughter is unique to man. This delightful anthology presents some of the funniest extracts in English literature. It opens with Anglo-Saxon riddles - 'they couldn't keep themselves warm on a diet of Beowulf - and continues with medieval memories, Tudor comic turns and Restoration buffoonery. The rise of the novel in the 18th century brought classic humour from Swift, Sterne and Smollett, the mantle then passing to Charles Dickens in the 19th. Included here are rarities from the antiquarian's cupboard. Children's literature produced unforgettable images from Wind in the Willows and Alice in Wonderland, while in the first half of the 20th century emerged unforgettable comic writers as diverse as Dorothy Parker and P.G. Wodehouse. Entertaining from start to finish.
Publisher: NAXOS
Author: David Timson
Narrator: Full Cast Production
ISBN: 9 62634 269 2
Haunted South, The, Part One
The American South is a land rich in history and tragedy…and ghosts! Let The Moonlit Road take you on a journey to some genuine haunted places. But don't worry, you don't have to get out of the car if you don't want to!
Publisher: The Moonlit Road.com
Author: Not Known
Narrator: Full Cast Production
ISBN:
Futureland
Life in America a generation from now isn't much different from today: The drugs are better, the daily grind is worse. The gap between the rich and the poor has widened to a chasm. You can store the world's legal knowledge on a chip in your little finger, while the Supreme Court has decreed that constitutional rights don't apply to any individual who challenges the system. Justice is swiftly delivered by automated courts, so the prison industry is booming. And while the media declare racism is dead, word on the street is that even in a colorless society, it's a crime to be black.
But the world still turns and folks still have to get by with the hands they're dealt, folks such as:
Ptolemy "Popo" Bent: This gentle backwoods child has a genius I.Q.- and a soul so pure that officials want him locked up forever...
Folio Johnson: A hardboiled, cyber-augmented private eye who can see beneath the dark poetry of the metropolis, he will need an even greater edge than that to find out who's systematically murdering rich, young Nazis...
Fera Jones: She's the boxing Queen of the Ring who must still fight all comers to save her dad, preserve her identity, and protect the fans who believe in her...
Dr. Ivan Kismet: The world's richest man, Macrocode's CEO is a tycoon, tyrant, and messiah who is evidently more powerful than God. So it's too bad for everyone that Dr. Kismet is utterly insane...
Walter Mosley brings to life the celebs, working stiffs, leaders, victims, technocrats, crooks, oppressors, and revolutionaries who inhabit a glorious all-American nightmare that's just around the corner. Welcome to FUTURELAND.
Publisher: Brilliance Audio Inc
Author: Walter Mosley
Narrator: Richard Allen
ISBN: 1597103179
Canterbury Tales - Volume III, The
The Friar's Tale
The Summoner's Tale
The Lawyer's Tale
The Seaman's Tale
The Prioress's Tale
The Manciple's Tale
The Physician's Tale
Seven more Tales presented here in unabridged modern verse - an ideal way to appreciate the genuinely funny and droll talent of England's early master storyteller. The group continues its pilgrimage to Canterbury, talking with each other, their interaction mediated (sometimes) by the affable Host - Chaucer himself. Eight leading British actors bring the medieval world into the 21st century, and at least in terms of character, not much seems to have changed!
The Canterbury Tales, written near the end of Chaucer's life and hence towards the close of the fourteenth century, Is perhaps the greatest English literary work of the Middle Ages: yet it speaks to us today with almost undimmed clarity and relevance.
Chaucer imagines a group of twenty-nine pilgrims who meet in the Tabard Inn in Southwark, intent on making the traditional journey to the martyr's shrine of St Thomas a Becket in Canterbury. Harry Bailly landlord of the Tabard, proposes that the company should entertain themselves on the road with a storytelling competition. The teller of the best tale will be rewarded with a supper at the others' expense when the travellers return to London. Chaucer never completed this elaborate scheme - each pilgrim was supposed to tell four tales, but in fact we only have twenty-four altogether - yet, with the pieces of linking narrative and the prologues to each tale, the work as a whole constitutes a marvellously varied evocation of the medieval world which also goes beyond its period to penetrate (humorously, gravely tolerantly) human nature itself.
Chaucer, as a member of this company of pilgrims, presents himself with mock innocence as the admiring observer of his fellows, depicted in the General Prologue. Many of these are clearly rogues - the coarse, cheating Miller, the repulsive yet compelling Pardoner - yet in each of them Chaucer finds something human, often a sheer vitality or love of life which is irresistible: the Monk may prefer hunting to prayer, but he is after all a manly man, to be an abbot able. Perhaps only the unassuming, devoted Parson and his humbly labouring brother the Ploughman rise entirely above Chaucer's teasing irony; certainly the Parson's fellow clergy and religious officers belong to a Church riddled with gross corruption. Everyone, it seems, is on the make, in a world still recovering from the ravages of the Black Death.
Publisher: NAXOS
Author: Geoffrey Chaucer
Narrator: Full Cast Performance
ISBN: 9 62634 304 4
