Audiobooks Narrated by Charles Featherstone

Reports From The First World War: Nowadays, Tales of War and Unhappy Far-Off Things

Includes the collections Nowadays, Tales of War, & Unhappy Far-Off Things  The great fantasy writer Lord Dunsany wrote very little in the way of fantasy after the onset of the First World War. This was partly because he was busy, having volunteered in 1915 and becoming a Captain in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in Derry. However, the reality of the world bore in on our hero at this time, and it is not difficult to imagine that his heart moved to more serious concerns. Dunsany’s days of high fantasy, it seems, ended with the emergence of civil unrest in his nation. This is why the non-fiction section is included at the end of this collection; while he wrote the odd fantasy work in later years, they were written by a distinctly different man, with a very different life.  For a week, he lay in a hospital bed, listening to the sounds of the riots as the British forces became increasingly violent and shelled the centre of Dublin with artillery. His military belt was left in the hospital, and eventually buried with the Nationalist leader Michael Collins. This, it seems, was the trigger for his change of heart, as expressed in ‘Nowadays’, towards poetry as the essence of writing. “In January 1917, under the stimulant of shellfire, I turned to poetry and wrote two poems in Plug-Street Wood”. After initially being refused forward positioning, he eventually served in the trenches. In this time, his literary output was focused on writing propaganda material for the War Office, some of which is collected in the non-fiction section of this volume.

Lord Dunsany (Author), Charles Featherstone (Narrator)

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The Author's Craft

Why do we write? What does it mean to be a writer? This book contains no useful tips on grammar, style, or plot. Instead, it focuses on the observation and perspective that is needed to be a good writer - on the fact that writing is an expression of the art of living. A lovely journey through a very Edwardian world.

Arnold Bennett (Author), Charles Featherstone (Narrator)

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Abrahamic Mysticism: Including: Hillel the Elder (110 BCE-10 CE), The Niche For Lights (c.1000 CE),

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, Three of the most important religions in western culture stem from the same original text. In today’s world, many of their branches are didactic and rule-bound, treating their holy texts as technical manuals rather than food for thought. Presented herein is the other side of their faiths, which focuses on the personal and lived experience of the divine. Each of these texts explores the increasingly experiential and personal experience of divinity, in sharp contrast to the mainstream faith’s increasing structure and organisation over the last two millennia. The four works trace an evolution of mystical trends: - Hillel the Elder (110 BCE-10 CE) – a description of a deep theological thinker whose understanding of the practice of divine experience in the world still resonates today. - The Niche For Lights (c.1000 CE) – an exploration trying to tie spiritual and scientific investigation together through a shared symbolic language. - The Cloud of Unknowing (c. 1350 CE) – An attempt to dispel the veil or cloud that blocks us from seeing what’s underneath the surface of reality. - The Forerunner and the Madman (1918 CE) – a book of poetry by Kahlil Gibran, focusing on the nature of transcendent experience through metaphor.

Abu Al-Ghazali, Hubert G Bradshaw, Khalil Gibran, Solomon Schechter, Wilhelm Bacher (Author), Charles Featherstone (Narrator)

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