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Gin Palace, The

Author : Emile Zola

Performed By : Frederick Davidson

Publisher : Blackstone Audio Inc

Runtime : 7 hours

Categories : Classic Literature

Our Price : $16.95

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"Unsurpassable...heroically big...the intensity of her creator's vision...of the dense sordid life...is one of the great things the modern novel has been able to do."--Henry James

"The Gin Palace delighted me...full of color, movement, and life."--Anatole France

"A born writer, marvelously gifted."--Guy de Maupassant

The Gin Palace is the seventh novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle, about two branches of a French family traced through several generations. Introducing one of the most sympathetic heroines in nineteenth-century literature, it is also the work that made his reputation.

Abandoned by her lover and left to bring up their two children alone, Gervaise Macquart has to fight to earn an honest living. When she accepts the marriage proposal of Monsieur Coupeau, it seems as though she is on the path to a decent, respectable life at last. But with her husband's drinking and the unexpected appearance of a figure from her past, Gervaise's plans begin to unravel tragically.

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Christmas Collection, The

Author : Various

Performed By : Full Cast Production

Publisher : Select Music & Distribution

Runtime : 2 hours 30 minutes

Categories : Poetry
Classic Literature
Dramatizations
Religious

Our Price : $11.99

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Christmas brings out the best and the worst in us, as can be seen in this evocative anthology. Among what Thomas Love Peacock calls the 'many poetical charms in the heraldings of Christmas' there are eulogies by saints and diatribes from curmudgeons. Here, Christmas is expounded by divines, sung by rustics, deplored by philosophers, made mystical in stories and summed up in a line by the poet Elizabeth Jennings: 'The hush, the star, the baby, people being kind again'.

This collection includes complete versions of such old favourites as 'The Little Match Girl', 'The Night Before Christmas', 'Ring out Wild Bells' and 'Christmas Day in the Workhouse'. But there are also discoveries: a sermon by Lancelot Andrewes, an account of Christmas under the Puritans, a first, poverty-stricken Christmas in turn of the century New York and a Mummer's Play. Adding the final touch is the music: from traditional Christmas carols and Corelli to Benjamin Britten. On this recording, Christmas past brings alive Christmas present.