More democracy means more freedom. Or does it?American democracy is, in many people's minds, the model for the rest of the world. Fareed Zakaria points out that the American form of democracy is one of the least democratic in use today. Members of the Supreme Court and the Federal Reserve, institutions that fundamentally shape our lives, are appointed, not elected. The Bill of Rights enumerates a set of privileges to which citizens are entitled, no matter what the majority says. By...

Inch by inch, day by day, Scott Carey is getting smaller. Once an unremarkable husband and father, Scott finds himself shrinking with no end in sight, the result of exposure to a radioactive cloud. He becomes a national spectacle, a freak that is bullied by teenagers and disrespected by everyone. His wife and family turn into unreachable giants, the family cat becomes a predatory menace, and Scott must struggle to survive in a world that seems to be growing ever larger and more perilous—un...

The basis for Hitchcock's 1927 movie by the same name, as well as a more recent major motion picture from 2009, this award-winning audio of Marie Belloc Lowndes' classic thriller still packs a wallop.An elderly couple living in Victorian London struggle against despair as their small resources dwindle. When an eccentric and mysterious gentleman answers their advertisement for a lodger, they celebrate. But as women begin dying at the hands of “The Avenger” on the fo...

On the eve of World War II, a murder in New York City draws two vastly different men, an American detective and a German intelligence officer, into the gathering storm.The death of a spinster nurse killed in her apartment was one of hundreds of simple homicides, indistinguishable from any other in 1938. A suspect was caught and convicted. Then Private Investigator Fintan Dunne is lured in to the case, and coerced by conscience into unraveling the setup that has put an innocent man ...

It’s midnight. Turn out the lights, cuddle with your true love, and shiver to fright-meisters Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. P. Lovecraft.Quicken your pulse with the elegant terror of Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Guy de Maupassant. Chortle at the black glee of H. H. Munro and Ambrose Bierce.These fourteen tales, plays, and poems, gleaned from cultures around the world, range from wickedly comic to deathly serious, from New England reserv...

Blackstone Audio presents an eclectic mix of stories, plays and sketches dedicated to the thinking paranoiac. Gore, sex, horror, literature and edifying morals—what more could you want from an audiobook?This collection includes "In a Grove," upon which Akira Kurosawa based his classic film, Rashomon; an adult fairy tale by the author of Winnie-the-Pooh; the real story (honest!) behind Edgar Rice Burroughs's novel The Moon Maid; and cautionary and scary ta...

Originally broadcast nationwide in 1993, this meticulously researched five-part historical drama is being published by Blackstone to commemorate Benjamin Franklin’s 300th birthdayThis production reveals the multifaceted, complex Franklin’s little-known adventures in London before the Revolution. For fifteen years, he lived on Craven Street off the Thames, where he established a surrogate family, began his autobiography, and became America’s most famous citizen.As tensions h...

Blackstone is pleased to present the first ever audio recordings of the only two Holmes plays written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This specially commissioned production by the Hollywood Theater of the Ear is a unique, must-have audio for all Sherlockians.In Sherlock Holmes, Professor Moriarity, the Napoleon of crime, plots with would-be blackmailers to have Holmes killed. And the normally love-proof Holmes falls for an exceptional woman.What is the secret of the shocking dea...

This is an exuberant group portrait of four extraordinary writers—Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Edna Ferber—whose loves, lives, and literary endeavors captured the spirit of the 1920s.Marion Meade re-creates the aura of excitement, romance, and promise of the 1920s, when these literary heroines did what they wanted, said what they thought, and kicked open the door for twentieth-century women, setting a new model for every woman tryi...

Inspired by the classic silent film of 1919, this original audio play won the Independent Publishers Award in 1998 for best direct-to-audio production. John de Lancie stars as a young poet who visits a fair one night with his friend and girlfriend. Entering Dr. Caligari’s tent, they meet the mysterious Cesare, a kind of zombie, who is neither alive nor dead—and who forecasts doom for our high-strung protagonist and his friends.Combining the directness of an old-time radio play and ...

When this groundbreaking, serialized dramatization premiered on 320 US radio stations, critics were unanimous in their praise, and it won numerous honors, including the George Foster Peabody Award, the Pulitzer Prize of broadcasting. Now twenty years after its first airing, Blackstone Audio is pleased to present this outstanding production.The 2,600-year-old poem tells of a man, a hero of cunning rather than brawn, who inhabits three worlds: first, the world of his...

The earliest extant heroic epic in any European vernacular, Beowulf is considered the most important poem in Old English. The title character is a warrior of superhuman strength who accomplishes glorious deeds to honor his king. He also represents the ideal lord and vassal, generous to his own men while fulfilling all the forms of courtesy at court. The narrative itself falls into two parts: Beowulf first rescues the royal house of Denmark from two marauding monsters; then, after having ru...