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Honolulu - listen book free online

A British playwright, novelist and short story writer William Somerset Maugham, better known as W. Somerset Maugham, was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest paid author during the 1930s. Commercial success with high book sales, successful theatre productions and a string of film adaptations, backed by astute stock market investments, allowed Maugham to live a ver... Read More

The Painted Veil - listen book free online

The highest paid author during the 1930s William Somerset Maugham was raised by a paternal uncle after both of his parents died before he was ten. For five years he studied medicine at the medical school of St Thomas's Hospital in Lambeth. The initial run of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time. During the First World War, he ser... Read More

The Three Fat Women of Antibes - listen book free online

William Somerset Maugham was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer. Born in the British Embassy in Paris, where his father worked, Maugham was an orphan by the age of ten. He was raised by an uncle, who tried to persuade the youngster to become an accountant or parson; Maugham instead trained as a doctor, although he never practised professionally, as his first novel, Liza of La... Read More

Cakes and Ale - listen book free online

Cakes and Ale, or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard is a novel by the British author W. Somerset Maugham. Maugham drew his title from the remark of Sir Toby Belch to Malvolio in William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night: "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" Late in life, Somerset Maugham claimed that this was the favourite among his novels and it is easy to... Read More

The Narrow Corner - listen book free online

W. Somerset Maugham was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer. A year after his first novel Liza of Lambeth was published Maugham began contributing to magazines and periodicals; initially, these were short stories, but he also wrote opinion pieces, non-fictional and autobiographical work, and letters. Much of his non-fictional writing was published in book form. The Narrow Corn... Read More

An Official Position - listen book free online

William Somerset Maugham, British playwright and novelist, was one of the most reputed and well-known writers of his era, and one of the highest-paid authors of his time. His work was popular for his simple style of writing, as well as his sharp and accurate understanding and judgment of human nature. An Official Position is a short story about crime and justice. Louis Remire, convicted of kill... Read More

Flotsam and Jetsam - listen book free online

William Somerset Maugham was an English playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was one of the most significant travel writers of the inter-war years, and can be compared with contemporaries such as Evelyn Waugh and Freya Stark. His best efforts in this line include The Gentleman in the Parlour, dealing with a journey through Burma, Siam, Cambodia and Vietnam, and On a Chinese Screen, a... Read More

Footprints in the Jungle - listen book free online

British novelist, playwright, short-story writer, Somerset Maugham was the highest paid author in the world in the 1930s. Despite his popularity, Maugham did not gain serious recognition from his contemporaries. In many of his novels, the setting is international and the stories are told in a clear, economical style. His thirst to see the world was evidenced by the fact that, disguising himself... Read More

Pygmalion - listen book free online

There's a reason why Pygmalion's been turned into a movie, a musical, and a movie musical. Shaw wrote the play in early 1912 and read it to famed actress Mrs Patrick Campbell in June. She came on board almost immediately, but her mild nervous breakdown contributed to the delay of a London production. Pygmalion premiered at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna on 16 October 1913, in a German translatio... Read More

Caesar and Cleopatra - listen book free online

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. Since Shaw's death scholarly and critical opinion has varied about his works, but he has regularly been rated as second only to Shakespeare among British dramatists; analysts recognise his extensive influe... Read More

The Spire - listen book free online

“There were three sorts of people. Those who ran, those who stayed, and those who were built in”. The Spire is a 1964 novel by the English author William Golding. William Golding was born in his grandmother's house, 47 Mount Wise, Newquay, Cornwall. Golding's mother, who was Cornish and whom he considered "a superstitious celt", used to tell him old Cornish fairy tales from her own childhood. I... Read More

Lord of the Flies - listen book free online

Sir William Gerald Golding, a British novelist, playwright, and poet, won a Nobel Prize in Literature and was awarded the Booker Prize for fiction in 1980 for his novel Rites of Passage. But he is best known for his novel Lord of the Flies. In September 1953, after many rejections from other publishers, Golding sent a manuscript to Faber & Faber. Monteith asked for some changes to the text... Read More

Main Street - listen book free online

An American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright Harry Sinclair Lewis became the first writer from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of humour characters." In the Academy's presentation speech, special attention was paid to Babbitt. In hi... Read More

An Imaginative Woman - listen book free online

English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain. Many of his novels concern tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances, and they are often set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex. An Imaginative Woman was first published as a serial in Pall Mall Magazine in... Read More

The Three Strangers - listen book free online

Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet. Hardy's first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, finished by 1867, failed to find a publisher. He then showed it to his mentor and friend, the Victorian poet and novelist, George Meredith, who felt that The Poor Man and the Lady would be too politically controversial and might damage Hardy's ability to publish in the future. So Hardy followed his ad... Read More

The Withered Arm - listen book free online

Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet. During his long life of 88 years, he wrote fifteen novels and one thousand poems. Considered a Victorian realist, Hardy examines the social constraints on the lives of those living in Victorian England, and criticises those beliefs, especially those relating to marriage, education and religion, that limited people's lives and caused unhappiness. Ha... Read More

Fellow Townsmen - listen book free online

Thomas Hardy is one of Britain’s greatest authors. Among his most famous works are Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. For a long time Thomas Hardy's short stories have suffered from critical indifference, perhaps, in part, because of the influence of assessments such as Irving Howe's that Hardy "seems to have regarded the writing of stories as mere journeyman's work by which to ear... Read More

Interlopers at the Knap - listen book free online

English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain. Considered a Victorian realist, Hardy examines the social constraints on the lives of those living in Victorian England. Also, Hardy wrote a number of significant war poems that relate to both the Boer Wars and World War I, including "Drummer Ho... Read More

The Distracted Preacher - listen book free online

Thomas Hardy is one of Britain’s greatest authors. Considered a Victorian realist, Hardy examines the social constraints on the lives of those living in Victorian England. Wessex Tales, a collection of short stories including The Three Strangers, The Withered Arm and Fellow Townsmen, deal with a number of timeless themes seen so often in Hardy’s work, including marriage, class, revenge and disa... Read More

The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion - listen book free online

Thomas Hardy, an English novelist and poet, failed to find a publisher for his first novel. He then showed it to his mentor and friend, the Victorian poet and novelist, George Meredith, who felt that The Poor Man and the Lady would be too politically controversial and might damage Hardy's ability to publish in the future. So Hardy followed his advice and he did not try further to publish it. He... Read More