Inkell
7 books read for LibriVox
- Shaw having fun with his own critics: a young woman's play gets staged anonymously, then actual reviewers bicker over who wrote it. Inside, two respectable kids come home from jail refusing to feel ashamed, and their parents' panic is funnier than it has any right to be.
- You get Mary Shelley’s darker, stranger side here, especially in “The Mortal Immortal,” where an alchemist’s mistake turns a love story into a meditation on outliving everyone you know. The stories can feel uneven and theatrically gothic, but their loneliness, moral unease, and fascination with bodies that refuse to behave stay with you.
- You get absurd political satire, shameless wordplay, and the wonderfully slippery Peisetairus, who talks a flock of birds into imagining a new city in the sky. It’s bawdy, strange, and occasionally more interested in a joke than a tidy plot, but the chorus and wild premise make it unusually vivid on the page.
- Mostly it's droll Thames-side comedy, skippers and mates scheming over the same girl in the title story, but tucked in among the jokes sit The Monkey's Paw and The Well, which still genuinely chill. Good bedside reading, one story at a time, half grins and the occasional shiver.
- If you think Gothic novels are all fainting and fog, this one goes places that still feel shocking: Ambrosio is Madrid's most revered preacher, and watching his vanity get worked open by the mysterious Matilda is genuinely unsettling. Lurid, cruel in spots, and weirdly fast-moving for 1796.