The House of the Seven Gables [Audio CD]

Nathaniel Hawthorne (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 2008

In a sleepy little New England village stands a dark, weather-beaten, many-gabled house. This brooding mansion is haunted by a centuries-old curse that casts the shadow of ancestral sin upon the last four members of the distinctive Pyncheon family of Salem.

The greed and haughty pride of the Pyncheon family through the generations is mirrored in the gloomy decay of their seven-gabled mansion, where the family's enfeebled and impoverished relations now live. Mysterious deaths threaten the living. Musty documents nestle behind hidden panels carrying the secret of the family's salvation--or its downfall.

A brilliant intertwining of the popular, the symbolic, and the historical, Hawthorne's gothic Romance is a powerful exploration of personal and national guilt, a work that Henry James declared "the closest approach we are likely to have to the Great American Novel."

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A large and generous production, pervaded with that vague hum, that indefinable echo, of the whole multitudinous life of man, which is the real sign of a great work of fiction." --Henry James

About the Author

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804-1864) was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and made his ambition to be a writer while still a teenager. He graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine, where the poet Longfellow was also a student, and spent several years traveling in New England and writing short stories before his best known novel, The Scarlet Letter, was published in 1850. His writing was not at first financially rewarding, and he worked as measurer and surveyor in the Boston and Salem Custom Houses. In 1853 he was sent to Liverpool as American consul and then lived in Italy before returning to the United States in 1860, where he died in his sleep four years later.

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Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.; Unabridged edition (February 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1433211971
• ISBN-13: 978-1433211973
• Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,377,735 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Almost a total massacure of this classic gem..., April 11, 2008

By 

Aramaki (GA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The House of the Seven Gables (Audio CD)

House of Seven Gables has been one of my favorite classics since the middle school days, decades ago. This review is of the CDs and the performance of the narrator himself, not about the novel. The reason I decided to buy it in the first place was becasue it was on sale for $15, and the fact that it's unabridged. Anthony Heald has terrible reading speed, he would pause at wrong places while not stopping at periods. Anyone that has read classic novels would know that most of them have long sentences with many semicolons, and conjunctions. He sounded like he's catching his breath quite often, and his pronounciation is kind of slurred as well. At least it didn't cost me that much. If you search for unabridged audio editions of this book, you'll find a few others by different companies, which all cost at least $30 or more. If you are poor then get this one, it's the cheapest. I'm certainly shopping for another set.