In this scene from Margaret Laurence’s novel The Stone Angel, the elderly Hagar Shipley has escaped from her son Marvin’s house, in order to avoid being placed in a nursing home. She finds refuge in an abandoned building in the forest, along the coast. She has nothing but rainwater to drink until a stranger appears — Murray Ferney Lees. Hagar…
Category: Feuilleton
This is an audio recorded reading from Chapter 1 of the 1930 novel Vile Bodies. In this scene, passengers are travelling on a ship across the English Channel from France to Dover, England. At the heart of the humorous scene is a sly Jesuit, Father Rothschild, and the entrepreneurial evangelist Mrs. Melrose Ape, along with her troupe of young women…
This is an audio recording of a scene from Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood. Hazel Motes, a tormented and blinded preacher of the fledgling “Church Without Christ” is persistently haunted by that “ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind” — a figure he tries to escape, yet can’t. In this scene Hazel Motes…
This is an excerpt from Graham Greene’s 1938 novel Brighton Rock read by me, as part of a new series of audio recordings entitled Feuilleton, sampling works of twentieth century literature. In this scene, the young and naive Rose is grappling with the recent suicide of her sociopath husband — who almost took her down with him along his dark, destructive…