Audio book

 

Kafka's Dick

Author : Alan Bennett

Performed By : Alan Bennett

Publisher : BBC Audiobooks Ltd

Runtime : 1 hour 30 minutes

Categories : Dramatizations
Humor

Our Price : $13.49

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Alison Steadman, Richard Griffiths and Nigel Anthony star in this BBC radio 4 version of Alan Bennett's acclaimed comedy drama

'Pure joy' Gillian Reynolds, Daily Telegraph

On his deathbed, Franz Kafka makes his faithful friend Max Brod promise to destroy his writings, so that future biographers can never pick over the secrets of his life. Flash forward to the present day, where Kafka aficionado Sydney Cunliffe is writing an article on the great man, and events begin to take a distinctly Kafkaesque turn. First a mysterious stranger appears on Sydney's doorstep, claiming to be Max Brod (who has been dead since 1968). Then the Cunliffes' tortoise metamorphoses into Kafka himself.

Max is desperate to prevent his old friend from discovering that he didn't burn all his books, for it soon becomes clear that all Kafka ever wanted was anonymity, and to get his own back on his bullying father But when Kafka Senior turns up, he insists that his son buries the hatchet. If not, he will reveal Kafka's secret - the real truth about him and his 'old man'...
Set in Prague, 27 Batcliffe Drive and Heaven, Bennett's brilliantly clever, fast-moving comedy not only examines the relationship between life and art, but also asks a rather more fundamental question: what exactly was Kafka's embarrassing little problem!

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King Lear

Author : William Shakespeare

Performed By : Full Cast Production

Publisher : Select Music & Distribution

Runtime : 3 hours 55 minutes

Categories : Shakespeare

Our Price : $15.49

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King Lear, perhaps Shakespeare's most profoundly searching and disturbing tragedy, is the story of a foolish and self-indulgent king who learns, late in life and after terrible suffering, the value of self-knowledge. The play asks the ancient questions about God and the meaning of pain with uncompromising directness, but provides no reassuring answers...

King Lear, probably dating from 1605, was first printed in a quarto version in 1608 and in a different form in the First Folio of 1623. It is the third In Shakespeare's great sequence of four tragedies: Hamlet (1600-01) and Othello (1602-1604) precede it, and Macbeth (1606) follows. It possesses the widest emotional and thematic reach of them all, occupying a space which achieves an almost abstract, symbolic quality while at the same time offering a painful concreteness of experience: it is both intensely personal and impressively universal, tackling the great questions of suffering and morality ('is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?') within the context of a social conscience CO! I have ta'en too little care of this') and an anguished questioning of God (or the gods, who, it seems, 'kill us for their sport').