Elizabeth Klett
The Machine Stops (version 3)
"The Machine Stops" is a science fiction short story by E. M. Forster. After initial publication in The Oxford and Cambridge Revie…
What Maisie Knew
What Maisie Knew is a poignant exploration of childhood innocence amidst the turmoil of adult relationships. When young Maisie Farange is ca…
The Turn of the Screw (version 2)
Henry James' classic ghost story comprises the written testimony of a young governess, charged with looking after two small children at an i…
Goblin Market and Other Poems
Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) is British writer Christina Rossetti's first book of poetry. The title poem is her most famous work: a …
Olalla
"Olalla" was a "shilling shocker" written for the Christmas season in 1885, just before the publication of Stevenson's D…
Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave
Aphra Behn was the first woman writer in England to make a living by her pen, and her novel Oroonoko was the first work published in English…
The Dead (version 2)
This novella is the final story in Joyce's collection Dubliners. It describes a Christmas party given by Kate and Julia Morkan, two elderly …
The Fifth Queen
The Fifth Queen invites listeners into the tumultuous world of Tudor England, where ambition and desire intertwine in the court of King Henr…
Quicksand
Quicksand is a 1928 novel by Nella Larsen, a writer of the Harlem Renaissance. It focuses on Helga Crane, a mixed-race woman who is a school…
Pauline's Passion and Punishment
Before she wrote Little Women and Little Men, Louisa, writing under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard, had this `blood and thunder' thriller (as sh…
The Marne: a tale of the war
American writer Edith Wharton is known for her novels of manners set in old New York; yet much of her adult life was spent in France. She li…
In Memoriam A.H.H.
In Memoriam is Tennyson's elegiac tribute to his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died in 1833 at the age of 22. Tennyson wrote this long poe…
The Waste Land (version 3)
The Waste Land is T. S. Eliot's Modernist masterpiece, first published in 1920. Rich in allusions to Shakespeare, Dante, Baudelaire, the Bib…
The House of the Vampire
The House of the Vampire is a 1907 novella that is a very unusual vampire story. A young writer comes under the powerful influence of a myst…
Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort
American novelist Edith Wharton was living in Paris when World War I broke out in 1914. She obtained permission to visit sites behind the li…
Ophelia, the Rose of Elsinore
This story is from Mary Cowden Clarke's multi-volume work The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, in which she imagined the early lives of c…
The Island
Written late in his career, Byron's narrative poem The Island tells the famous story of the mutiny on board the Bounty, and follows the muti…
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral
Phillis Wheatley was the first African-American to publish a book of poetry in 1773. Born in West Africa, she was sold into slavery at age s…
The Princess
The Princess is a serio-comic blank verse narrative poem, written by Alfred Tennyson, published in 1847. The poem tells the story of an hero…
Shakespeare's Sonnets (version 4)
Shakespeare's sequence of 154 sonnets deals with such themes as love, time, death, immortality, lust, and sex. The poems follow but also dep…