Here's something a little new from our friends at LADBROKE AUDIO...a series of fanciful tales by Frank R. Stockton, released one a week for 9 weeks. At the end of the 9 weeks you will be able to buy any of the individual tales, or grab all 9 at a discounted package price. Read and produced by Neil Gardner, with music composed by Jon Nicholls.

As always, we offer you the files in three flavours - 192Kbps Stereo (higher than CD quality), 256 and 320Kbps Stereo...each file is higher quality than the one before, but that means the file size gets larger too (and the corresponding download time). Whichever you choose, it costs exactly the same!

ONE - THE BEE MAN OF ORN
A lonely old man lives in a hut in the forest with just his bees for friends. One day a young wizard passes by and tells him that he has been transformed into a bee-man from something else. If the bee-man discovers what it is he has been transformed from, the wizard and his masters will return the man to his original form. And so the bee-man sets off on his travels to try and learn just what it was that he was before he became the Bee-Man of Orn.
192Kbps Stereo MP3 PRICE - £1.99	256Kbps Stereo MP3 PRICE - £1.99	320Kbps Stereo MP3 PRICE - £1.99

TWO - THE GRIFFIN & THE MINOR CANNON
A monstrous griffin visits a small town to see the sculpture of himself over the church doors. In doing so he befriends the minor canon, but scares off many of the townsfolk. The town persuades the canon to leave, hoping the griffin will leave with him, but the plan backfires and the town is stuck with the griffin who decides to take on the canon's jobs.
192Kbps Stereo MP3 PRICE - £1.99	256Kbps Stereo MP3 PRICE - £1.99	320Kbps Stereo MP3 PRICE - £1.99

THREE - OLD PIPES & THE DRYAD
An old man is shocked to learn that his piping is no longer strong enough to call the animals from the mountains back to his village. While walking to the village he frees a dryad from her tree, who kisses him twice and thus, an enchantment is put upon him which makes him 20 years yonger. Once again his piping is strong enough but now the selfish echo dwarf in the mountains opposite is forced to play back the notes once again and decides to do something about the situation!
192Kbps Stereo MP3 PRICE - £1.99	256Kbps Stereo MP3 PRICE - £1.99	320Kbps Stereo MP3 PRICE - £1.99

FOUR - CHRISTMAS BEFORE LAST
FREE AUDIO! Especially for Xmas and New Year, we offer this short story completely free. Enjoy!   The Horn'o'Plenty sails the sea between two ports...the captain has family in both ports and takes it in turn each Christmas to visit one of the families. However, this year he rescues some stranded schoolboys and takes so long trying to find their home island that he misses Christmas entirely. Discovering a strange island with a mysterious fruit, the Captain and his crew get caught up in adventures involving Royalty, corsairs and merchants.
192Kbps Stereo MP3 PRICE - FREE	256Kbps Stereo MP3 PRICE - FREE	320Kbps Stereo MP3 PRICE - FREE

7 further fanciful tales will be added, one per week until the end of January 2012. Come back every week for more great storytelling.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Frank Richard Stockton (April 5, 1834 – April 20, 1902) was an American writer and humorist, best known today for a series of innovative children's fairy tales that were widely popular during the last decades of the 19th century. Stockton avoided the didactic moralizing, common to children's stories of the time, instead using clever humor to poke at greed, violence, abuse of power and other human foibles, describing his fantastic characters' adventures in a charming, matter-of-fact way in stories like "The Griffin and the Minor Canon" (1885) and "The Bee-Man of Orn" (1887), which was published in 1964 in an edition illustrated by Maurice Sendak. "The Griffin and the Minor Canon" won a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1963.

His most famous fable is "The Lady, or the Tiger?" (1882), about a man sentenced to an unusual punishment for having a romance with a king's beloved daughter. Taken to the public arena, he is faced with two doors, behind one of which is a hungry tiger that will devour him. Behind the other is a beautiful lady-in-waiting, whom he will have to marry, if he finds her. While the crowd waits anxiously for his decision, he sees the princess among the spectators, who points him to the door on the right. The lover starts to open the door and ... the story ends abruptly there. Did the princess save her love by pointing to the door leading to the lady-in-waiting, or did she prefer to see her lover die rather than see him marry someone else? That discussion hook has made the story a staple in English classes in American schools, especially since Stockton was careful never to hint at what he thought the ending would be (according to Hiram Collins Haydn in The Thesaurus of Book Digests,ISBN 0-517-00122-5). He also wrote a sequel to the story, "The Discourager of Hesitancy".