Elizabeth Klett
82 libri letti per LibriVox
- A Doll’s House EnglishYou spend the whole play watching Nora play the giggling little wife Torvald wants, sneaking macaroons and dancing the tarantella, while something underneath tightens like a wire. It reads fast, feels a bit stagey at first, then that final scene lands and stays with you.
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream EnglishYou get a play that keeps changing its mind about love, from the quarrelling lovers in the forest to Bottom blundering through his amateur performance. The language is playful and slippery, and Puck gives the whole thing a mischievous sense that human beings are never quite in control.
- A Room With a View EnglishWatching Lucy Honeychurch slowly admit what she actually wants, despite her chaperone and the insufferable Cecil, is quietly satisfying, and Forster is funnier than you'd expect. A gentle book, honestly, but the kind that leaves you wanting to say yes to things.
- A Woman of No Importance EnglishWilde lets his idle aristocrats trade epigrams for two acts, and Lord Illingworth is horribly quotable, then the play turns serious when Mrs Arbuthnot's old secret surfaces. If you want pure froth you might resist the melodrama, but the wit alone earns the evening.
- Antigone EnglishAn hour's read that leaves a bruise: a young woman buries her brother knowing it will kill her, and Creon digs in until it costs him everything. If you like arguments where both sides have a point and neither will bend, this is the one.
- Antony and Cleopatra EnglishThese two aren't young lovers, they're middle-aged, vain, magnificent messes who keep wrecking empires over each other, and you half want to shake them. Stay for Enobarbus, the dry-eyed friend whose barge speech about Cleopatra is worth the whole play.
- Aurora Floyd EnglishIf you liked Lady Audley's Secret, this is Braddon in a warmer mood: Aurora is impulsive and flawed (she horsewhips a stablehand in one startling scene) but you end up rooting for her anyway. It's melodrama with blackmail and a murder, so come ready for that.
- Behind a Mask EnglishYou get a deliciously uneasy read in Jean Muir, a governess whose composed manners conceal a very sharp understanding of the Coventry family’s vanities. It’s melodramatic and morally slippery, but that’s the fun: Alcott lets you watch respectable people mistake performance for virtue.
- Charlotte Temple EnglishYou get a compact, surprisingly affecting story of Charlotte’s bad judgment, Montraville’s selfish charm, and Mademoiselle La Rue’s polished manipulation. The moralizing is heavy and the sentiment unapologetic, but its scenes of shame, loneliness, and social ruin still land if you’re patient with its eighteenth-century melodrama.
- Coriolanus EnglishYou get a fiercely strange tragedy about pride, hunger, and the impossibility of speaking to people you despise. Coriolanus is magnificent and maddening, while Volumnia’s hard, hungry love gives the play its deepest ache; the Roman politics can feel blunt, but the language cuts.
- Cymbeline EnglishCome to it for Imogen, who stays clear-eyed and funny while everyone around her behaves appallingly (Iachimo hiding in a trunk to spy on her is genuinely creepy). The plot is a wild tangle, but the last scene, where every secret unravels at once, is weirdly satisfying.
- Edward II EnglishMarlowe writes a king who wrecks his kingdom for love of Gaveston and somehow makes you pity him more as he loses everything. It's bleak, cruel in places, and the deposition scenes cut deep.
- Edward III EnglishYou get a rough, episodic history play with flashes of Shakespearean energy, especially in Edward’s pursuit of the Countess of Salisbury and the Black Prince’s battlefield speeches. It’s uneven and not wholly Shakespeare’s, but the mix of courtly temptation, war, and sudden moral seriousness makes it an intriguing afternoon read.
- Electra EnglishFair warning, this is grief held at a scream for most of its length, Electra pacing outside the palace refusing to let her father's murder go quiet. But when she cradles the urn she believes holds her brother's ashes, the scene wrecks you every time.
- Emma EnglishEmma herself is spoiled, meddling, and wrong about nearly everything, and somehow you root for her anyway. Austen lets you see every mistake before Emma does, which makes the whole thing quietly funny.
- Ethan Frome EnglishYou settle into the bitter winter of Starkfield, where Ethan’s longing for Mattie and his strained life with Zeena make every quiet room feel tightly sealed. It’s spare, bleak, and emotionally piercing, with the sledding scene showing how Wharton can make a small pleasure carry frightening weight.
- Evelina EnglishYou get an awkward education in eighteenth-century manners as Evelina blunders through assemblies, opera boxes, and the Branghton family’s dreadful company. Her letters make every slight feel immediate, while Lord Orville’s restraint gives the romance room to breathe.
- Exiles EnglishJoyce's one play, and it's all talk, three people circling the question of whether love can survive total freedom, with Richard almost daring his partner Bertha toward another man. Slow and cerebral in the Ibsen mold, but if you like watching jealousy dissected honestly, it stings.
- Ghosts EnglishFair warning, this one is bleak: Mrs. Alving has spent years protecting her dead husband's reputation, and you watch the cost of that lie come due in a single day. Short, tense, and quietly furious about respectability.
- Heartbreak House EnglishMostly it's clever people lounging in a house shaped like a ship, talking circles around each other while old Captain Shotover mutters prophecies from the corner, and somehow that's the fun. If you like Shaw's talk more than plot, this is him at his strangest, with a jolt at the end.
- Henry VIII EnglishYou’ll like it for its grand, ceremonial feel and the sharp human cost beneath the pageantry, especially in Katherine of Aragon’s dignity and Wolsey’s sudden collapse. It’s episodic and more interested in public power than intimate character, so expect a stately history play rather than another Hamlet.
- Herland EnglishYou follow Van, Jeff, and Terry into a country run entirely by women, watching their assumptions get calmly, sometimes hilariously, dismantled. Gilman is preachy and her ideal society feels tidier than real life, but its arguments about motherhood, work, sex, and education still have bite.
- Hippolytus EnglishYou get a painfully human tragedy out of Phaedra’s attempt to live honorably while desire and divine spite close in around her. Hippolytus is austere, self-righteous, and oddly moving, and the play’s argument between Aphrodite and Artemis leaves you thinking about purity, shame, and who gets punished for wanting.
- Howards End EnglishMargaret Schlegel is one of the few people in fiction who tries to be genuinely good without being insufferable about it, and watching her navigate the blunt, moneyed Wilcoxes is quietly absorbing. It moves gently, more conversation than event, but Forster's warmth sneaks up on you.
- Idylls of the King EnglishCamelot falls in slow motion here, and Tennyson makes you feel every crack, from Lancelot's tired guilt to that last barge carrying Arthur away in the mist. It's blank verse and it takes patience, but on a quiet evening the sadness really lands.
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl saggistica EnglishYou feel the claustrophobia of Linda Brent’s years in the tiny garret, but also the intelligence and stubborn courage she brings to every choice. The book is painful and sometimes openly strategic in its appeal to Victorian readers, yet its voice remains startlingly direct and alive.
- Jane Eyre EnglishYou follow Jane from the bleak Lowood school into Thornfield, where her sharp conscience matters as much as her feelings for Rochester. The romance is Gothic and emotionally intense, but what keeps you reading is Jane’s refusal to trade self-respect for comfort, even when she desperately wants love.
- Julius Caesar EnglishYou get political persuasion at close range: Brutus speaks as if reason can keep a republic clean, while Cassius understands how fear and resentment move people. The funeral speeches are thrilling to read aloud, but the play leaves you with uneasy questions about honor, crowds, and unintended consequences.
- Major Barbara EnglishYou get a sharp, funny argument about whether moral goodness can survive without money, as Major Barbara wrestles with her arms-dealing father, Andrew Undershaft. Shaw gives you brilliant talk rather than much action, and the play keeps unsettling your sympathies long after the jokes land.
- Married Love English
- Medea EnglishYou watch Medea turn her intelligence and rhetorical skill against a city that has already decided she is disposable. The Nurse’s fearful opening and the Chorus’s uneasy sympathy make the play feel intimate, tense, and morally uncomfortable, not like a tidy revenge story.
- Misalliance EnglishFair warning, almost nothing happens except talk, but the talk is so good you won't mind: an airplane crashes into a rich underwear magnate's greenhouse mid-argument, and out steps a Polish acrobat who upends everyone. If you like watching smug people get dismantled in conversation, this is a treat.
- Moving the Mountain EnglishHonestly it's more thought experiment than novel, but there's real fun in watching John, a man who lost thirty years in Tibet, come home to a remade America and sputter at working women and clean cities while his sister patiently explains. Read it curious, not for plot.
- Much Ado About Nothing EnglishBeatrice and Benedick spend the whole play insulting each other so cleverly you'll want to read their scenes twice, and watching their friends trick them into admitting the obvious is pure pleasure. There's a nasty turn with Hero midway, but the comedy earns its way back.
- My Brilliant Career EnglishSybylla Melvyn is prickly, vain, self-mocking, and completely alive, a teenage girl in dusty New South Wales who wants more than marriage and can't quite forgive herself for it. If you like narrators who argue with you (and themselves), she'll get under your skin.
- News from Nowhere EnglishA man wakes up in a future England where work feels like pleasure and the Thames runs clean, then spends the book rowing upriver and asking questions. Short on plot, generous with conversation, and oddly restful; read it when you want to argue gently with a dream.
- Northanger Abbey EnglishYou’ll have fun watching Catherine Morland’s Gothic reading turn ordinary corridors and cabinets into suspicious mysteries, while Henry Tilney gently teases her back toward reality. It’s lighter and more openly comic than Austen’s other novels, but still sharp about marriage, money, and the stories people tell themselves.
- Oedipus at Colonus EnglishSophocles wrote this near ninety, and it shows in the best way: a blind, exhausted Oedipus finally finding a place that will take him, with Antigone at his elbow. Slower and stranger than Oedipus Rex, but the ending has a quiet awe that stays with you.
- Oedipus Rex EnglishYou watch Oedipus investigate the plague-stricken Thebes with fierce intelligence and a stubborn faith in truth, even as every answer makes his position more precarious. The play is spare, formal, and emotionally severe, but its pressure builds with remarkable clarity, leaving you thinking about knowledge, responsibility, and what you can bear to learn.
- On a Chinese Screen EnglishYou read this as a string of sharp, compact encounters rather than a conventional travel book: river journeys, shabby hotels, missionaries, officials, and Chinese strangers pass before Maugham’s amused eye. It’s observant and often funny, though its colonial assumptions can make the distance uncomfortable.
- Othello EnglishIago talks to you directly, and the awful thing is you almost enjoy his company while he wrecks a good man's life over a handkerchief and some careful hints. It's painful in the way only watching preventable disaster is, so save it for when you can take that.
- Persuasion EnglishYou get Austen at her most autumnal here: Anne Elliot’s quiet self-command carries a story about regret, second chances, and the humiliations of being sensible. It moves more inwardly than Pride and Prejudice, but Captain Wentworth’s letter makes the patience feel entirely worth it.
- Philoctetes EnglishShort enough to read in an evening, and it stays with you: a man abandoned on an island for ten years with a stinking wound, and young Neoptolemus slowly realizing he can't stomach the lie Odysseus wants him to tell. If you like watching a conscience wake up, this is it.
- These are careful, formal couplets in the style of Pope, elegies and hymns mostly, so come patient. But when Wheatley, enslaved and barely twenty, tells the Earl of Dartmouth exactly why she loves freedom, the restraint cracks open and you feel history looking straight at you.
- Poetry EnglishFair warning, these are hard poems, gas attacks and boys dying in the mud, but Owen writes them with such tenderness that you come out feeling more human, not less. Strange Meeting alone, two soldiers talking in some underworld, will sit with you for weeks.
- Pride and Prejudice EnglishElizabeth Bennet is the reason to read it: quick, wrong about things, and honest enough to admit it eventually. The barbs between her and Darcy still land, and Mr. Collins's proposal is genuinely funny.
- Quicksand EnglishHelga Crane never quite fits anywhere, not Harlem, not Copenhagen, and you feel her restlessness in your own chest as she keeps moving. It's short and beautifully written but genuinely suffocating by the end, so save it for when you can sit with that.
- Richard III EnglishRichard talks straight to you from the first speech, so you end up half rooting for a murderer and enjoying it, especially when he woos Anne over her father-in-law's coffin. If you like villains who make you complicit, this moves fast and never apologizes.
- Sense and Sensibility EnglishYou get Elinor’s steady self-command alongside Marianne’s reckless openness, and Austen lets their different ways of feeling rub against family pressure, gossip, and bad judgment. The romance is satisfying, but the real pleasure is watching Elinor think clearly while everyone around her behaves absurdly.
- She Stoops to Conquer EnglishYou get a wonderfully playable comedy here, with Tony Lumpkin stirring up trouble and Kate Hardcastle disguising herself as a barmaid to find out what Marlow is really like. The plotting is deliberately tangled and theatrical, but the dialogue stays bright, mischievous, and surprisingly sharp about shyness and social performance.
- Shirley EnglishSlower and stranger than Jane Eyre, this one, but Shirley Keeldar herself is worth the wait: an heiress who runs her own estate and calls herself Captain Keeldar, half teasing, half serious. If you like Yorkshire moors, mill riots, and quiet, prickly friendships between women, settle in.
- Summer EnglishWharton at her most sun-drunk and least buttoned-up: Charity Royall, restless in a tiny New England town, wants things girls in 1917 weren't supposed to want, and Wharton lets her. It's short, sensual, and quietly devastating, so don't expect the ending to pat your hand.
- Tartuffe EnglishYou'll spend most of it wanting to shake Orgon, who's so besotted with his pious houseguest that he ignores everyone, including his sharp-tongued maid Dorine, who steals every scene she's in. It's fast, mean, very funny, and reads in an evening.
- The Alchemist EnglishThree con artists set up shop in a plague-emptied London house and fleece everyone who knocks, and watching Face and Subtle improvise faster and faster as the marks pile up is genuinely funny. The Jacobean language takes some chewing, but the scheming underneath is pure farce.
- The Awakening EnglishYou’ll appreciate how quietly radical Edna Pontellier’s awakening feels, less like a grand rebellion than a growing refusal to keep performing the life expected of her. The Gulf, the bluegrass music, and Mademoiselle Reisz’s piano give the novel a sensual, restless texture, though its emotional coolness can take a little patience.
- The Bacchae English
- The Cherry Orchard EnglishYou spend time with the tender, maddening Ranevskaya and the newly wealthy Lopakhin, as everyone talks around the fate of the estate and avoids the decisions that might save it. It’s quietly funny and deeply sad, with the strange feeling of hearing laughter in a house already beginning to empty.
- The Doctor’s Dilemma EnglishYou get Shaw’s particular pleasure from watching Dr. Ridgeon argue about who deserves saving, while the charming, unscrupulous artist Louis Dubedat exposes how quickly medical ethics become vanity and self-interest. It’s talky and deliberately provocative, best if you enjoy ideas sparring onstage more than tidy drama.
- The Duchess of Malfi EnglishYou get a dark, ferociously theatrical tragedy where the Duchess’s private marriage collides with her brothers’ vicious control, and Bosola watches it all with a bitter, uneasy intelligence. The plot turns brutal, but Webster’s language and the play’s strange flashes of tenderness keep it from becoming mere gloom.
- The Fifth Queen EnglishFord writes the Tudor court as all shadow and candle smoke, corridors where Cromwell's spies listen behind every arras, and his Katharine Howard is stubbornly learned and principled in a world that punishes both. Slow, dense, gorgeous prose; if you want brisk palace intrigue, look elsewhere.
- The House of Arden EnglishTwo squabbling kids inherit a ruined castle and a grumpy white mole who only works magic when they manage not to quarrel, which is harder than it sounds. Nesbit's time-hopping treasure hunt is funny and a bit melancholy underneath, and the bickering feels true in a way most children's books dodge.
- The House of Mirth EnglishLily Bart will break your heart slowly, watching her hesitate one time too many while New York society quietly closes its doors on her. Wharton's sentences are sharp and cool, but the book itself is sad, so save it for when you can handle sad.
- The House of the Wolfings EnglishFair warning, Morris writes in deliberately old-fashioned prose that keeps breaking into verse, so it asks patience. But Thiodolf's choice, between a charmed hauberk that saves his life and the good of his folk, has real weight, and you can feel Tolkien taking notes.
- The Inspector General EnglishA vain little nobody blows into a corrupt town, gets mistaken for a government inspector, and just rolls with it, borrowing money from every trembling official in sight. You'll read it in an evening, laugh at Khlestakov's shameless lying, then notice the satire still lands on people you know.
- The Merchant of Venice EnglishThe comedy bits are light (Portia testing suitors with riddle caskets), but Shylock's "hath not a Jew eyes" speech will sit with you for days. It's uncomfortable, deliberately or not, and that tension is exactly why it's worth arguing about afterward.
- The Portrait of a Lady EnglishYou get Isabel Archer, bright, independent, and determined to shape her own life, then watch that confidence meet the subtler traps of Europe’s social world. It’s slow, inward, and finely observant, rewarding you if you like moral pressure more than brisk action.
- The Room in the Dragon Volant EnglishYou spend the whole thing wincing at young Richard Beckett, rich, vain, and hopelessly smitten with a veiled countess, while an inn where guests keep vanishing closes around him. It reads like a ghost story but plays fairer than that, and the ending genuinely unnerves.
- The School for Scandal EnglishGossip as blood sport, and Sheridan makes every barb land. The screen scene, where Lady Teazle's hiding spot collapses in front of everyone, is still genuinely funny after 250 years.
- The Tempest EnglishYou spend time on an island with Prospero, Ariel, and Caliban, where magic, resentment, and theatrical illusion keep changing the ground beneath you. It’s airy and strange rather than tightly plotted, but the movement toward forgiveness gives the play a quietly human weight.
- You get why people still quote it once Mephistopheles calmly admits he's in hell right now, standing there. The middle sags into slapstick with popes and horse traders, honestly, but Faustus watching his last hour tick away is worth the whole slim thing.
- The Turn of the Screw EnglishYou never find out whether the governess is seeing ghosts or losing her mind, and James makes that uncertainty itch for days after. The prose winds around itself, so save it for a patient evening, ideally one where a figure at the window would unsettle you.
- The Two Gentlemen of Verona EnglishEarly, slight, and a bit lumpy (the ending will make you yelp), but Launce's monologues to his stone-faced dog Crab are some of the funniest pages Shakespeare wrote, and Julia in disguise carries real ache. Read it if you like watching genius warm up.
- The Two Noble Kinsmen EnglishYou get an unusual, slightly lopsided Shakespeare play here, with Palamon and Arcite’s fierce friendship turning into rivalry over Emilia, while the Jailer's Daughter brings a surprisingly tender, earthy counterpoint. The verse shifts between Shakespearean weight and Fletcher’s brisker comedy, so its strangeness is part of the appeal.
- The Wings of the Dove EnglishYou need patience for James’s long, winding sentences, but they reward you with astonishing access to Kate Croy’s calculations, Merton Densher’s evasions, and Milly Theale’s vulnerable generosity. The pleasure lies in watching love, money, and conscience blur until you’re unsure whom to pity.
- The Winter’s Tale EnglishYou get Shakespeare at his strangest here: Leontes’ jealousy makes the early scenes painfully claustrophobic, then Paulina’s fierce intelligence and a sudden pastoral brightness change the air. It’s uneven and openly theatrical, but its movement from damage toward forgiveness stays with you.
- Three Sisters EnglishNot much happens, which is the point: three sisters keep saying they'll go to Moscow and you slowly realize they never will. If you can sit with that ache, the Prozorov house, Natasha quietly taking it over room by room, will stay with you for years.
- Timon of Athens EnglishYou’ll appreciate its strange, abrasive energy: Timon’s lavish generosity curdles into furious contempt, while Apemantus needles him with the honesty nobody else will risk. It’s a jagged, unfinished-feeling play, but if you like Shakespeare when he’s bitter, funny, and morally unruly, it stays with you.
- Titus Andronicus EnglishFair warning, this is Shakespeare at his most lurid, a revenge spiral that keeps outdoing its own cruelty, and Aaron might be his most gleefully unrepentant villain. If you like your tragedy pulpy and unhinged rather than stately, you'll have a grim good time.
- Troilus and Cressida EnglishYou get Shakespeare at his most sour and slippery here: Troilus and Cressida’s love story keeps colliding with Pandarus’s bawdy meddling, while Ulysses and Hector make the Trojan War feel tawdry rather than heroic. It’s strange, funny, and deliberately hard to settle into, but richly rewarding.
- Twenty Years at Hull House EnglishAddams writes like someone thinking out loud about why comfortable idealism wasn't enough, and her account of ditching the "snare of preparation" to actually move in among Chicago's immigrant poor still stings a little. Slow and earnest in places, but her honesty about her own mistakes keeps it human.
- Ulysses EnglishYou’re glad you read it for the strange intimacy of spending a day inside Leopold Bloom’s mind, where errands, advertisements, hunger, and memory keep turning unexpectedly funny and tender. It’s demanding and occasionally maddening, but the jokes, wordplay, and Molly Bloom’s closing monologue reward patience.
- Uncle Vanya EnglishYou’ll recognize the ache in Vanya, who has spent his life serving someone else’s work, and in Sonya, quietly carrying on while Astrov dreams of forests and Elena drifts through the room. It’s funny in that painfully human Chekhov way, and its sadness sneaks up on you.