The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles is a novella by American author Herman Melville. First published in Putnam's Magazine in 1854, it consists of ten philosophical Sketches on the Encantadas, or Galápagos Islands. It was collected in The Piazza Tales in 1856. The Encantadas was to become the most critically successful of that collection. All of the stories are replete with symbolism reinforcing the cruelty of life on the Encantadas. (Introduction excerpted from Wikipedia)...

Fiction

A mysterious woman is found murdered in a yellow boudoir. Who is she and where does she come from? Detective Absalom Gebb is on the case. (Introduction by MaryAnn)...

Mystery, Fiction

volunteers bring you 17 recordings of You Bid Me Try by Austin Dobson . This was the Weekly Poetry project for April 24, 2011. Henry Austin Dobson , commonly Austin Dobson, was an English poet and essayist. His official career was uneventful, but as a poet and biographer he was distinguished. Those who study his work are struck by its maturity. It was about 1864 that he turned his attention to writing original prose and verse, and some of his earliest work was his best. It was not until 1868 that the appearance of St Paul's, a magazine edited by Anthony Trollope, gave Harry Dobson an opportunity and an audience; and during the next six years he contributed some of his favourite poems, including Tu Quoque, A Gentleman of the Old School, A Dialogue from Plato, and Une Marquise. Many of his poems in their original form were illustrated—some, indeed, were written to support illustrations. (summary from Wikipedia)...

Humor, Romance, Poetry

volunteers bring you 16 recordings of Be Kind When You Can by Eliza Cook. This was the Weekly Poetry project for January 30, 2011. Eliza Cook was an English author, Chartist poet and writer born in London Road, Southwark. She was the daughter of a local tradesman. She attended the local Sunday Schools and was encouraged by the son of the music master to produce her first volume of poetry. From this she took confidence and in 1837 began to offer verse to the radical Weekly Dispatch, then edited by William Johnson Fox. She was a staple of its pages for the next ten years. She also offered material to The Literary Gazette, Metropolitan Magazine and New Monthly. (summary from Wikipedia)...

Literature, Poetry, Advice, Instruction, Philosophy, Romance

John Stuart Mill's book Utilitarianism is one of the most influential and widely-read philosophical defenses of utilitarianism in ethics. The essay first appeared as a series of three articles published in Fraser's Magazine in 1861; the articles were collected and reprinted as a single book in 1863. It went through four editions during Mill's lifetime with minor additions and revisions. Although Mill includes discussions of utilitarian ethical principles in other works such as On Liberty and The Subjection of Women , Utilitarianism contains Mill's only major discussion of the fundamental grounds for utilitarian ethical theory. (Summary from Wikipedia)...

Philosophy

Uncle Remus, that genial old storyteller, knows how to spin these wonderful tales about the 'criteers' that the little 6 year old boy (and many of us adults!) love to listen to. Yet the 'Brer Rabbit and 'Brer Fox and the others sound a lot like the people all around us. They tell stories about personalities and faults and virtues in a way that is unique to Uncle Remus. As the shadows grow longer outside, draw up a rocking chair next to the little boy, settle back and listen to the wise old man tell these stories. These 17 stories were specially chosen from Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings and include The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story, Miss Cow falls a Victim to Mr. Rabbit; Mr. Fox and the Deceitful Frogs; Mr. Rabbit grossly deceives Mr. Fox and lots of others. (Summary by phil chenevert)...

Children, Humor, Philosophy

Allen's books illustrate the use of the power of thought to increase personal capabilities. Although he never achieved great fame or wealth, his works continue to influence people around the world, including the New Thought movement. Allen's most famous book, As a Man Thinketh, was published in 1902. It is now considered a classic self-help book. Its underlying premise is that noble thoughts make a noble person, while lowly thoughts make a miserable person....

Philosophy

Reading bedtime stories to children can be a wonderful way to relax and at the same time act out the exciting things happening in the story for them. If you've done it, you know the feeling and if you haven't I can only hope that you were the rapt audience for such stories when a child. We can let ourselves go and perform all the parts with abandon because the only audience are those who unreservedly appreciate our thespian talents. These 25 stories are all original and all sparkling examples of Abby Walker's ability to spin a witty story that is fun to read and listen to. Don't you really want to know about The Good Sea Monster? The Shoemaker Rat or most of all, The Disorderly Girl? If not, you may go back to reading Kant with my blessing. (Summary by Phil Chenevert)...

Children

volunteers bring you 5 recordings of To the Man of the High North by Robert Service. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for November 28, 2010. Robert William Service (January 16, 1874 – September 11, 1958) was a poet and writer, sometimes referred to as the Bard of the Yukon. His writing was so expressive that his readers took him for a hard-bitten old Klondike prospector, not the later-arriving bank clerk he actually was. In addition to his Yukon works, Service also wrote poetry set in locales as diverse as South Africa, Afghanistan, and New Zealand....

Adventure, Fiction, Instruction, Literature, Nature, Philosophy, Poetry

Few things, even in literature, can really be said to be unique — but Moby Dick is truly unlike anything written before or since. The novel is nominally about the obsessive hunt by the crazed Captain Ahab of the book’s eponymous white whale. But interspersed in that story are digressions, paradoxes, philosophical riffs on whaling and life, and a display of techniques so advanced for its time that some have referred to the 1851 Moby Dick as the first “modern” novel. (Summary by Stewart Wills)...

Adventure, Sea stories

Hard Times, the shortest of Dickens's full-length novels, is set in the fictitious Victorian-England city of Coketown, where facts are the rule and all fancy is to be stamped out. The plot centers around the men and women of the town, some of whom are beaten down by the city's utilitarian ideals and some of whom manage to rise above it. The novel was written in 1854 and was a scathing attack on then-current ideas of utilitarianism, which Dickens viewed as a selfish and at times oppressive philosophy. Perhaps the novel's best features are its clever, ironic narration and the larger-than-life characters that push the plot forward, such as the upper-class banker and hypocritical braggart, Josiah Bounderby, and the fact-driven schoolmaster, Thomas Gradgrind. (Summary by Rosalind Wills)....

Satire

This is an essay on decision biases and a critique on prejudices, neatly written and thought provoking. (Summary by sidhu177)

Philosophy, Advice, Essay/Short nonfiction

Seneca the Younger wrote the moral essay De Brevitate Vitae — On the Shortness of Life — to his friend Paulinus. The philosopher brings up many Stoic principles on the nature of time, namely that men waste much of it in meaningless pursuits. According to the essay, nature gives man enough time to do what is really important and the individual must allot it properly. (Introduction by xxxx)...

Classics (antiquity), Philosophy

The Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, that is, the philosopher-scientists who lived before or contemporaneously to Socrates, were the first men in the Western world to establish a line of inquiry regarding the natural phenomena that rejected the traditional religious explanations and searched for rational explanations. Even though they do not form a school of thought, they can be considered the fathers of philosophy and many other sciences as we have them now. None of their works is extant, so, in this collection, we present the textual fragments, when existing, of ten Pre-Socratic philosopher-scientists, and quotations and testimonials about them left by later authors. (Summary by Leni)...

Philosophy, Essay/Short nonfiction

Science Fiction is speculative literature that generally explores the consequences of ideas which are roughly consistent with nature and scientific method, but are not facts of the author’s contemporary world. The stories often represent philosophical thought experiments presented in entertaining ways. Protagonists typically “think” rather than “shoot” their way out of problems, but the definition is flexible because there are no limits on an author’s imagination. The reader-selected stories presented here were written prior to 1962 and became US public domain texts when their copyrights expired. (Summary by Gregg Margarite)...

The Summa Theologica (or the Summa Theologiae or simply the Summa, written 1265–1274) is the most famous work of Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) although it was never finished. It was intended as a manual for beginners as a compilation of all of the main theological teachings of that time. It summarizes the reasonings for almost all points of Christian theology in the West, which, before the Protestant Reformation, subsisted solely in the Roman Catholic Church. The Summa's topics follow a cycle: the existence of God, God's creation, Man, Man's purpose, Christ, the Sacraments, and back to God.(Summary adapted from the Wikipedia) These are parts three and four of six parts of the Pars Prima, consisting of questions regarding the Angels, and the Work of the Six Days....

Religion, Philosophy

volunteers bring you 13 recordings of The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd by Sir Walter Raleigh. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for October 14, 2012. The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd, sometimes called 'Her Reply' was written in response to Christopher Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd to His Love. (Summary by David Lawrence)...

Poetry, Humor, Nature, Philosophy, Romance

The Summa Theologica (or the Summa Theologiae or simply the Summa, written 1265–1274) is the most famous work of Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) although it was never finished. It was intended as a manual for beginners as a compilation of all of the main theological teachings of that time. It summarizes the reasonings for almost all points of Christian theology in the West, which, before the Protestant Reformation, subsisted solely in the Roman Catholic Church. The Summa's topics follow a cycle: the existence of God, God's creation, Man, Man's purpose, Christ, the Sacraments, and back to God.(Summary adapted from the Wikipedia) This is part two of six parts of the Pars Prima, consisting of questions regarding the Trinity and Creation....

Religion

In Defense of Women is H. L. Mencken's 1918 book on women and the relationship between the sexes. Some laud the book as progressive while others brand it as reactionary. While Mencken didn't champion women's rights, he described women as wiser in many novel and observable ways, while demeaning average men. According to Mencken's biographer, Fred Hobson: Depending on the position of the reader, he was either a great defender of women's rights or, as a critic labelled him in 1916, 'the greatest misogynist since Schopenhauer','the country's high-priest of woman-haters.' (Summary from wikipedia)...

Philosophy

“The following report appeared in the Argus newspaper of Saturday, the 28th July, 18-- “Truth is said to be stranger than fiction, and certainly the extraordinary murder which took place in Melbourne on Thursday night, or rather Friday morning, goes a long way towards verifying this saying. A crime has been committed by an unknown assassin, within a short distance of the principal streets of this great city, and is surrounded by an inpenetrable mystery. … “On the twenty-seventh day of July, at the hour of twenty minutes to two o'clock in the morning, a hansom cab drove up to the police station in Grey Street, St. Kilda, and the driver made the startling statement that his cab contained the body of a man who he had reason to believe had been murdered….” (Excerpt from the first chapter.)...

Mystery