Franz Kafka was one of the first and greatest masters of dystopian literature. In his bleak world view, man is presented as helpless and ineffectual, his destiny determined by distant, obscure, and essentially unfriendly agencies. In none of his works is this savage and unreasoning enslavement prese...
Together with the Iliad, the Odyssey, The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, the Aeneid is one of the true monuments of world literature. Like all these great classics, over the centuries it has become stultified by academic formalism, and its true glory as a narrative of thrilling power and richness...
Old Granny Fox was a wise old fox who lived with her grandson Reddy. Reddy is young and impulsive and gets into a great deal of trouble because of this. So Granny must teach him the lessons of nature if he is to survive. The practical lessons about theft, gratitude and kindness that Granny teaches R...
Sometimes a man's pride paints them into a corner. The men of Forty Mile watch as two of their own are set to duel, each feeling they have suffered at the hands of the other. Malamute Kid hates to see them kill each other, he wasn't even sure they really wanted to, but perhaps he could find a way to...
Thornton W. Burgess was a conservationist and author of children's stories. He loved the beauty of nature and its living creatures so much that he wrote about them for 50 years. By the time he retired, he had written over 170 books and 15,000 stories for the daily newspaper column. The Adventures of...
Read by award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti, Common Sense is a pamphlet written by Thomas Paine in 1775-76 that inspired people in the Thirteen Colonies to declare and fight for independence from Great Britain in the summer of 1776. The pamphlet explained the advantages of and the need for immediat...
Another H. P. Lovecraft masterpiece. We have all heard of alien abductions, but what if the alien forces only exchange the mind of the abductee with a mind to occupy that of the abductee's body while the mind travels in the body of an alien to be mined for information concerning the abductee's world...
Tweedle Dee and brother Dum recited a bit of Wonderlandic poetry. Nonsensical? Yes, but this is a brilliant sample of the world in which Alice found herself. If there is a moral to this delightful poem it may be that it is not wise to be an oyster. On second thought, perhaps there is no discernible...
E. M. Forster provides a view of the future from 1909. He comes alarmingly close. Humanity has lost the ability to live above ground, but they communicate magnificently through the Machine. As a matter of fact the Machine handles just about everything, taking the freedom of choice, or the need to ch...
At fifty degrees below zero, your spit freezes instantly upon hitting the ground. At seventy-five below zero, it freezes in mid-air. If you get wet at that temperature you need to know one thing, and know it very well - how to build a fire. Audible •
