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Narrator

Thomas Whitworth

Thomas Whitworth

  • In 1804, while a student at Oxford, Thomas De Quincey was looking for relief from excruciating pain when a college acquaintance recommended opium. "Opium!" De Quincey wrote. "Dread agent of unimaginable pleasure and pain! I had heard of it as I had of manna or of ambrosia, but no further: how unmeaning a sound it was at that time!"

    Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, De Quincey's best-known work, is an account of his early life and opium addiction, in prose that is by turns witty, conversational, and nightmarish. The Confessions involve the listener in De Quincey's childhood and schooling, describing in detail his flight at age sixteen from Manchester Grammar School, his wanderings in North Wales and London, and his experiences with opium, which developed into a lifelong dependency.

  • George MacDonald was the great nineteenth-century innovator of modern fantasy, who influenced the work of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. This book collects some of his finest fairy stories, including "The Gray Wolf," "The Cruel Painter," "The Broken Swords," "The Wow O'Rivven, the Bell" "Uncle Cornelius, His Story," "The Butcher's Bills," and "Birth, Dreaming, Death."

    "I do not write," MacDonald once said, "for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five." Here then, for the childlike of all ages, is a collection of seven stories certain to delight both confirmed MacDonald readers and those about to meet him for the first time.