Naxos Audiobooks, is offering a couple of free audiobook downloads this month!
Here’s part of the description of the first one:
Bierce’s ghost stories are not among the best-written but they are unusual and distinctly ‘modern’ in their definition of what constitutes a ‘ghost’. They enjoy a popularity today that eluded them during Bierce’s lifetime, perhaps because the late twentieth century reader is more prepared to accept his psychological approach to the genre. The stories resist neat classification, no conclusions are offered. Whatever the true nature of the entity in The Damned Thing, Bierce offers no tidy answer. One of the protagonists offers his theory but it is no more than that and you are left with the feeling that perhaps the entity wanders the earth to this day and that Bierce merely recorded one episode of its existence.
The Damned Thing
By Ambrose Bierce; Read by Jonathan Keeble
1 |MP3| – Approx. 20 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Naxos Audiobooks
Published: 2007
ISBN: 9789626344941
First published in 1894.
The Damned Thing has been adapted as an episode of Masters Of Horror as well as for the comics in Graphic Classics: Ambrose Bierce, 2nd Edition:
The second audiobook is longer, but not huffduffable. It’s wrapped in a zipped folder with 12 MP3s (and also includes a wonderful 8 page PDF with story notes by Chloé Harmsworth).
The Canterville Ghost
By Oscar Wilde; Rupert Degas
1 Zipped MP3 – Approx. 77 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Naxos Audiobooks
Published: 2009
ISBN: 9789626349748
“A terrifying ghost is haunting the ancient mansion of Canterville Chase, complete with creaking floorboards, clanking chains and gruesome disguises – but the new occupants seem strangely undisturbed by his presence. Deftly contrasting the conventional gothic ghost story with the pragmatism of the modern world, Wilde creates a gently comic fable of the conflict between old and new. Rupert Degas’s hilarious reading brings the absurdity and theatricality of the story to life.”
The Canterville Ghost has been adapted to film more than a dozen times! Here’s the trailer for the first such, from 1944:
Posted by Jesse Willis