Audio book in mp3

 

Hard Times

Author : Charles Dickens

Performed By : Frederick Davidson

Publisher : Blackstone Audio Inc

Runtime : 11 hours 30 minutes

Categories : Classic Literature

Our Price : $23.95

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"A bitter indictment of industrialization, with its dehumanizing effects on workers and communities in mid-19th-century England."

--Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

"The narrator's British accent goes well with Dickens's overly dramatic and lush prose."

--AudioFile

Originally written for Dickens's weekly magazine, Household Words, this short novel follows the fate of Sissy Jupe, a warm-hearted circus child, and the family that adopts her. Deserted by her ailing father, Sissy is taken into the cold household of the Gradgrind family, which operates a school. The "eminently practical" Thomas Gradgrind believes only in facts and figures and has raised his children accordingly, thoroughly suppressing the imaginative sides of their nature. They grow up in ignorance of love and affection, of beauty and culture, or of empathy for others, and the consequences are devastating. Only after numerous crises does Thomas realize that his principles have corrupted their lives.

Dickens's satirical expos of the Industrial Revolution condemns the utilitarianism that exploited the bodies, minds, and souls of the vulnerable labor class.

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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.