A House of Pomegranates

by Oscar Wilde

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Pages: 66

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Read by Alex Lau · 3 h 26 min · 6 parts

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1 - The Young King
33:30
2 - The Birthday Of The Infanta
46:05
3 - The Fisherman And His Soul (Part 1)
31:19
4 - The Fisherman And His Soul (Part 2)
29:17
5 - The Fisherman And His Soul (Part 3)
27:05
6 - The Star-Child
39:11

A House of Pomegranates (1891) is a public domain work.

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About this book

A palace full of beautiful objects surrounds a young heir who once tended a goatherd's flock. On the night before his coronation, he admires the clothes and jewels prepared for him, then dreams of hungry workers at their looms. Oscar Wilde places royal luxury beside the labor that produces it, turning the opening of The Young King into a question about the cost of beauty.

Published in 1891, the collection contains four fairy tales, with courts, magic and troubled desires among their concerns. In The Fisherman and his Soul, a fisherman demands that a witch explain how he can part from his soul. A religious sign breaks up a gathering before their tense exchange continues. The detailed descriptions of rooms, ornaments and strange figures offer readers more than decorative settings: they make the characters' attraction to beauty and power part of the stories' moral conflicts.

About the author

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish author, poet and playwright. After writing in different literary styles throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular and influential dramatists in London in the early 1890s.