Description: "Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales continue to exert the same pull over the imagination and emotions as they did when he first read them to his children in the 1880s. Written with inspired poetic intensity and sudden flowerings of the matchless wit for which he is so well remembered, the stories combine the wisdom of parables with the impact of drama. I have loved them since I was a child: indeed they continue to make a child of me. I do not mind admitting that at the recording some passages were hard to read out loud without choking. I hope you will be as entranced by them as I have always been." written by Stephen Fry.

Description: A treasure-chest of the written and spoken word, this collection is read by brilliant actors who make this audio anthology a genuine treat for the listener. Includes: "Reginald on House Parties" by Saki, read by Nigel Hawthorne; "The Sphinx Without a Secret" by Oscar Wilde, read by Martin Jarvis; "Tobermory" by Saki, read by Barbara Leigh-Hunt; "On Being Idle" by Jerome K. Jerome, read by Hugh Laurie; "For Better or Worse" by W.W. Jacobs, read by Joanna David; "The Model Millionaire" by Oscar Wilde, read by T.P. McKenna; "The Garden of Truth" by E. Nesbit, read by Harriet Walker; "The Cat That Walked by Himself" by Rudyard Kipling, read by Liza Goddard; "The Girl from Arles" by Alphonse Daudet, read by Stephen Fry; "Mr. & Mrs. Dove" by Katherine Mansfield, read by Rosalind Ayres; "Georgie Porgie" by Rudyard Kipling, read by Edward Fox; "Caterpillars" by E.F. Benson, read by Patrick Malahide; "Lost Hearts" by M.R. James, read by Richard Pasco; "Ship to Tarshish" by John Buchan, read by Iain Cuthbertson; "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe, read by Richard Pasco; "The Man of the Night" by Edgar Wallace, read by Robin Bailey; "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, read by Nicky Henson; "B 24" by Arthur Conan Doyle, read by Brian Cox; "Pat Hobby & Orson Welles" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, read by Kerry Shale; "Mad" by Guy de Maupassant, read by Derek Jacobi; "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe, read by Richard Griffiths; and "The Monkey's Paw" by W.W. Jacobs, read by Patrick Malahide.

"It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth." Satire and pointed social commentary join with love, mistaken identity, and a missing baby in a missing handbag. An auraldelight, this play is perhaps Wilde's wittiest and most-loved romantic comedy.

Staged in 1893, when Wilde had already achieved fame, wealth and notoriety, A Woman of No Importance was another attempt to fuse comedy of manners with high melodrama. Gerald Arbuthnot is a young man on the make, with an American heiress and the post of secretary to the brilliant but dissolute Lord Illingworth within his reach. When he asks his mother to celebrate with them, it turns out that Illingworth is Gerald's father, who seduced and abandoned his mother twenty years earlier. Loyalty weighs heavier than ambition, and Gerald declines the association with Illingworth. This edition, which also analyses Wilde's various drafts and revisions of the play, argues that the playwright here continued to explore the rivalry between an older man and woman for the affection of a beautiful young man.

The Happy Prince and Other Fairy Tales
Author: Oscar Wilde
Format: MP3 and PDF
Bitrate: 128 kbps
Size: ca 18,2 MB
Language: English

The Picture of Dorian Gray
Author: Oscar Wilde
Date: 1992
Language: English
Read by: Gill Nevel
Sound quality: MPEG 2.0 layer 3, 64kbit, 16kHz Mono
Total track length: 1 hour 22 minutes
Size: 35.9Mb [4% recovery info]