The first season focuses on the short story tradition, and B. J. Harrison has selected some of the most prominent representatives of the genre. As far as the thematic aspect is concerned, the stories cover crime and mystery episodes like Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Speckled Band", or revenge-driven ones like Shakespeare's "Hamlet". There are also supernatural and horror classics such as Hawthorne's "The Devil and Tom Walker" and W. W. Jacobs' masterpiece "The Monkey's Paw". Of course, the listener can also rest their sanity a bit with the stories of O. Henry and Edith Warton. Still, the overall focus falls on the supernatural and mysterious element.
B. J. Harrison started his Classic Tales Podcast back in 2007, wanting to breathe new life into classic stories. He masterfully plays with a wide array of voices and accents and has since then produced over 500 audiobooks. Now in collaboration with SAGA Egmont, his engaging narration of these famous classics is available to readers everywhere.
The authors included in the award-winning first season are Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, W. W. Jacobs, Theodore Dreiser, H. G. Wells, Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley, O. Henry, Edith Wharton, Oscar Wilde, Washington Irving, E. Nesbit, William Shakespeare, Rudyard Kipling, Guy de Maupassant, Mark Twain, Henry W. Longfellow, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
