34 episodes listed below
Lang's Orange Fairy Book, read aloud tale by tale.
Andrew Lang's 'The Orange Fairy Book' is read here as a public-domain LibriVox recording, one tale to each numbered chapter, with titles such as 'The Story of the Hero Makoma', 'The Girl-Fish' and 'The Magic Book'. The sampled readings keep the old phrasing intact, so knights grow wroth and disgraced brothers are fain to leave the country.
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This is a public-domain LibriVox recording of 'The Orange Fairy Book', the collection credited to Andrew Lang, read chapter by chapter. The episodes are numbered, with a Preface at 00, and the chapters carry the names of individual tales. Run down the titles and a map of the collection appears. Animals are everywhere: 'The Fox and the Wolf', 'The Owl and the Eagle', 'The Clever Cat', 'The Adventures of the Jackal's Eldest Son'. Enchanted things recur as well, in 'The Magic Mirror', 'The Two Caskets', 'The White Slipper', 'The Magic Book' and 'The Three Treasures of the Giants'. Heroes, thieves and fools take the title roles in 'The Story of the Hero Makoma', 'Pinkel the Thief' and 'The Foolish Weaver'. Three sampled chapters show how those tales sound in full. 'Ian, the Soldier's Son' begins with a knight's three daughters swept beneath the waves by a great beast, then follows the youngest of a soldier's three sons as he goes after them. A raven who asks only for tobacco as payment guides him past giants, a stable door that swings without ceasing and a horse that does not care whether it travels by land or sea. The raven also gives him odd counsel: if asked where he came from, he should answer that he came from behind him. 'The Enchanted Wreath' is a stepfamily story built on small kindnesses. A good girl who feeds starving doves wins a wreath of singing roses and a prince, while her stepmother and stepsister scheme to take her place. 'The Ugly Duckling' opens among the tall burdocks of a Danish summer, where one grey egg hatches into a bird nobody wants. The cat and the hen dismiss him because he can neither lay eggs nor purr. A winter rescue by a family ends with him flapping through the milk-pan, the butter-dish and the meal-barrel before he flees into the snow. Spring brings the swan. Consequences are handed out plainly. The brothers who claimed Ian's deeds find that no one will speak to them, and they leave the country, and the stepmother and her daughter are put on a ship to a desert island. Helpers come in animal form, the raven and the doves among them, and generosity toward them is repaid. The prose keeps its period texture: a knight grows wroth, a heroine sews with her thimble wet from tears, and a giant's only rival is sought within 'the four brown boundaries of the sea'. The sampled chapters each credit a different reader, Jadopi, Chris Caron and Julie van Wallen, so the voice changes between stories while the collection's wording carries through. Beyond the LibriVox announcement and that credit, these recordings add no framing: the story starts, runs and ends. 'The Enchanted Wreath' is the clearest place to see the collection's moral machinery at work.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants classic fairy tales read straight from the page in their old-fashioned wording, with each chapter holding one complete story and no added commentary. The stern punishments and peril may suit older children and adults better than the very young.
What sets it apart: It does not retell or modernise the stories. It reads Lang's chapters aloud as a public-domain LibriVox project, with the credited reader changing between the chapters sampled, and period diction such as 'wroth' and 'fain' stays in place.
Andrew Lang's Fairy Books or Andrew Lang's "Coloured" Fairy Books constitute a twelve-book series of fairy tale collections. Although Andrew Lang did not collect the stories himself from the oral tradition, the extent of his sources, who had collected them originally (with the notable exception of Madame d'Aulnoy), made them an immensely influential collection, especially as he used foreign-language sources, giving many of these tales their first appearance in English. As acknowledged in the prefaces, although Lang himself made most of the selections, his wife and other translators did a large portion of the translating and telling of the actual stories. Many of the books were illustrated by…
An iron chain summons a giant; your bedtime story has its boots on.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A lonely grey duckling passes through burdocks, rejection, and gunfire before finding a still pool of white swans.
An ugly grey egg disturbs a duck's summer nest beneath the tall burdocks, and the bird that emerges is quickly made into an outsider: bitten, called ugly, rejected by wild ducks, and pushed toward a soft marshy moor where a chance to leave is cut short by gunfire.
Serialized pulp radio drama: Red Panda battles android-army supervillain Captain Clockwork in 1930s Toronto.
Mike Muncer and a different guest dissect two horror films per episode, by subgenre.
Joe Lipsett and Trace Thurman find queer subtext in everything from Anaconda to The Mummy.
A reading of Hans Andersen's fairy tale 'The Two Caskets' from Andrew Lang's Yellow Fairy Book, about a mistreated stepdaughter thrown into a well.
A reading of chapter twenty from Andrew Lang's Orange Fairy Book, telling the story of a young man who sets off to find a wife.
A reading of the fairy tale 'The White Doe' from Andrew Lang's Orange Fairy Book, beginning with a queen who longs for a child and encounters a talking crab.
The Orange Fairy Book's "The Ugly Duckling" starts in Denmark with a duck sitting on six eggs, including one large grey egg that does not match the others.
A reading of 'The Clever Cat' from Andrew Lang's Orange Fairy Book, a classic fairy tale collection.
This episode is a reading of Chapter XI from Andrew Lang's Orange Fairy Book.
A reading of 'The White Slipper' from Andrew Lang's Orange Fairy Book, a classic fairy tale about a beautiful princess and her suitors.
Sixteen-year-old Hans leaves Pedder and Kirsten to enter service with an old white-bearded man beneath a mountain.
Andrew Lang's The Orange Fairy Book presents José, a wandering brother who discovers hidden wealth in an old wooden chest.
A reading of the fairy tale 'The Enchanted Wreath' from Andrew Lang's Orange Fairy Book, about a good and beautiful girl sent into the forest to retrieve her father's axe.
A reading of the fairy tale 'Ian, the Soldier's Son' from Andrew Lang's Orange Fairy Book, about a knight whose daughters are taken by a sea beast and a soldier's son who challenges the knight.