Showing results for "Stories" in Classics

Have you ever wondered how and why the animals came to be as they are? In these magical tales, drawn from stories he heard as a child in India as well as on folk traditions he later collected all over the world, Rudyard Kipling gives some wonderfully imaginative explanations.

This audiobook, read by Audie award-winning narrators, includes unabridged recordings of all Mark Twains's greatest works: 12 novels; over 120 of his beloved short stories; Chapters From My Autobiography; 5 pieces of short non-fiction; and 6 pieces of his groundbreaking, wide-ranging travel writing.

In 1789 HMS Bounty under the command of Lieutenant William Bligh sailed off on a voyage to Tahiti in the South Pacific to obtain breadfruit trees for transplanting in the Caribbean. After a long, difficult voyage, in which a passage of Cape Horn had to be abandoned, the ship finally reached its destination. Within a few months, the Bounty was loaded with breadfruit plants and fresh provisions. But the return voyage never materialized.

There will never be another Western writer like Louis L’Amour. A legendary author and indisputably the greatest storyteller in his genre of all time, L’Amour captivated millions of readers and has sold well over three hundred million copies of his works, which includes nearly ninety novels and countless short stories. Mistakes Can Kill You highlights an essential selection featuring nine of L’Amour’s earlier short stories, sometimes written under the pen name Jim Mayo, that exemplify the rugged morality of the best Western writing.

Kipling’s Just So Stories are among the most enduring classic children’s tales. They follow the traditional genre of stories which explain how unusual natural phenoma came about, often using fantastic and highly magical explanations. Kipling himself was born and spent his very early life in India, and some of the inspiration for these stories comes from traditional tales he heard from his ayah and the family’s other servants.

"How the Whale Got His Throat", "The Elephant's Child", "How the Leopard Got His Spots", "How the Alphabet Was Made" and "The Butterfly That Stamped" are just a few of these enchanting tales of the dawn of the world.

Bible Stores includes 33 of the best known stories from the Holy Bible, including Adam and Eve, Noah and the Ark, Hagar and Ishmael, Abraham and Issac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Gideon, Samson, Ruth, David, Solomon, Elijah, Daniel, Jesus' birth, the Wise Men, Jesus in the temple, the Sermon on the Mount, the good shepherd, the betrayal of Jesus, and many more.

Brought to you by Penguin. A brilliant collection of short stories and short form fiction from the pen of Sir Terry Pratchett, one of the world's best-loved authors. A Blink of the Screen charts the course of Pratchett's long writing career: from his schooldays through to his first writing job...

Ambrose Bierce brings to life the heart rendering stories of divided loyalties, splitting families, states, countries, and individuals. He writes of the glory in beginning and savagery in the doing. Here is a moving anti-war series of stories if ever there was one. A must read by all students of American History and Literature, though perhaps best understood by older adults.

The second of Richard Hannays’ adventures takes him from the trenches of the First World War on a mission of vital importance to the British campaign in the East. In an attempt to manipulate their Turkish allies the Germans have created a religious figurehead, a prophet of a new order to unify the disparate tribes of Asia and crush the allied offensive.

In a remote part of 19th-century Afghanistan, two British adventurers pursue their ambition to rule an empire. Using betrayal, threats, and guns, they win the respect of a primitive tribe and become worshipped as gods until one day they draw blood, and the game is up. "The Man Who Would Be King" is an action-packed tale about the pitfalls of colonialism and the temptations and evils of power.

Patrick O’Brian is acclaimed as one of the greatest historical novelists of the twentieth century, celebrated throughout the world for his masterful roman fleuve, the Aubrey‒Maturin series. But he was also a prolific writer of short stories, and it is in this form that he first made his mark. Encompassing stories written in his unvarnished youth to tales told by a seasoned traveller, this is the most comprehensive collection of O’Brian’s short fiction ever published. It is a treasure chest, containing more than sixty tales, including rarities, uncollected works, and forgotten jewels.

In The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry provides a roadmap for the human soul. A stranded pilot meets a golden-haired boy from Asteroid B-612 who reveals the absurdity of "grown-ups"—those so consumed by authority and figures that they have forgotten how to live.

Amara’s life didn’t start out easy. As a child, she hid from the slavers. Then, she hid from her own government, until a chance meeting on the side of the road changed the course of her life for the better. Now an adult with a secure and prosperous life, a chance meeting with a traveling bard and ensuing street fight leaves Amara with a difficult decision.

As part of his campaign of torment and trickery against the native village, whose members he holds responsible for his ape foster mother's death, Tarzan captures Rabba Kega, the local witch doctor, and puts him in a trap the natives have set to catch a lion. The next day the warriors find they have caught the lion, but it has killed the witch doctor. They take the lion to the village. Tarzan secretly releases it and appears among them dressed in the lionskin he had previously used to trick the apes. Dropping the disguise, he reveals himself and leaves.

Having been unsuccessful hunting, Tarzan robs the native village of some rotten elephant meat, which he eats. Becoming ill from the tainted meal, he has a horrible nightmare, in which he dreams himself menaced by a lion, an eagle, and huge snake with the head of a village native. He is carried off by a giant bird but wakes in the fall from its grasp, finding himself back in the tree where he'd gone to sleep. He realizes the incidents were not real. Subsequently attacked by a gorilla, he assumes that this too is a product of his fevered imagination, until actually wounded and hurt.

Jealous of Taug and Teeka's relationship with their baby, Tarzan kidnaps Tibo, a little boy from the neighboring village to be his own "balu". He tries with indifferent success to teach the terrified and homesick child ape ways. Meanwhile, Momaya, Tibo's mother does everything she can think of to find and recover her son, even visiting the hermit witch-doctor Bukawai, a terrible, diseased exile who keeps two fearsome hyenas as pets. He names a price for recovering Tibo she cannot afford, and she leaves disappointed.

Fourteen-year-old Frank Brown has a respectable home, a secure future waiting in his father's long-established firm, and a family who expect him to take the safe road. But Frank's heart is elsewhere. A restless longing for ships, salt wind and far horizons has taken hold of him, and no argument...

Tarzan vainly attempts to impress on his ape tribe the necessity of maintaining a strict watch against the hazards and perils surrounding them. To drive home the lesson, he dons a lionskin he has taken from Mbonga's village and suddenly appears among them, only to find them more vigilant than he had thought, as they mob him and nearly beat him to death. He is saved only by the courage of his monkey friend Manu, which he had also previously under-rated, who risks all to reveal to Teeka and Taug that the "lion" is actually Tarzan.

Discovering bullet cartridges in his deceased father's cabin, Tarzan takes them with him as curios. Subsequently, Teeka is taken by an ape from another tribe, and Tarzan and Taug join forces to trail the kidnapper and rescue her. When they catch up, they are surrounded by the enemy tribe and nearly overwhelmed, until Teeka throws the cartridges at their foes in an apparently futile effort to help. When some of them hit a rock, they explode, frightening the hostile apes and saving her "rescuers".