Showing results by publisher "Spoken Realms" in Anthologies & Short Stories

The Giant Wistaria, which was originally published in 1891, is a short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Let's join this well-to-do young couple and their friends as they look forward to a lovely summer in the haunted house they rent.

If I Were a Man is a short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This story, published in 1914, is a "fly on the wall" view of a man's inner landscape as witnessed by his wife, whose wish to inhabit a male consciousness comes true.

A cat walking across a room swerves suddenly and walks carefully around something we can't see. We shrug, smile, and remark that cats are always doing that. Our hitherto amiable dog suddenly develops the irritating habit of barking and growling violently at certain innocent passersby. We still shrug, wonder what's got into the mutt, and pass it off. Mr. Dick argues with frightening urgency that if we are wise, we wilt immediately investigate these oddities of animal behavior.

Narrated by Mike Vendetti and Kathy Verduin, Cat in the Rain is not just about a cat. The cat can be taken at face value and surface-level as "just" a cat, and the events of the story as being a minor snapshot into one hour's events in the lives of an American couple living in 1920s Italy. But since when in our own lives do events simply happen without having wider implications? Many things we do are motivated by other desires, drives, wants, fears, and anxieties.

The devil always held a fascination for decadent poet Charles Baudelaire. In this brief morality tale, the author sells his soul for good fortune, and, ironically, for relief from the crushing sense of ennui that traditionally accompanies an indulgent lifestyle.

Nella Braddy (1894-1973), a pioneer among female editors, compiled this seven-story collection and published Masterpieces of Adventure: Tales of the Sea and Sky in 1921. It features seven authors: Frank Norris, W. Clark Russell, Major General E.D. Swinton, Donn Byrne, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Guy de Maupassant, and Edgar Allan Poe. A century since publication, we can perhaps have a new appreciation for tales of the sea (on ships both wrecked and abandoned, in lighthouses and with ferocious currents) and the sky (with warfare in dirigibles and using balloons).

The Seven Conundrums is seven different short stories. A mysterious man employs three desperate entertainers who have financial problems. The three accept his work proposal, not knowing if they are on the side of good or evil. As they work for the mystery man, they don't know if he is a thief, police, or both, making them spies, guardians, protagonists, and victims of curious adventures. After all, conundrums do not necessarily have a right or reasonable solution by their nature. In the end, however, all becomes known to the trio.

The Happy Prince and Other Tales is a collection of five stories first published in 1888. Oscar Wilde said of these stories that "they are studies in prose, put for Romance's sake into a fanciful form: meant partly for children, and partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy, and who find in simplicity a subtle strangeness." The five stories in this collection are "The Happy Prince", "The Nightingale and the Rose", "The Selfish Giant", "The Devoted Friend", and "The Remarkable Rocket".

Queen Marguerite de Navarre was one of the most powerful women of her age. Her masterpiece, The Heptameron, is a collection of some 72 stories told by five gentlemen and five ladies who find themselves stranded in an abbey. Proposed as an edifying way of passing the time while a bridge is being repaired, the tale-telling - as well as the conversations that follow each story - quickly becomes a battle of wits between the sexes, with tales concerning illicit lovers, romantic conquests, lecherous monks, manly honor, and women's virtue.

In Tales of the Unknown, Wells' series of 15 stories investigate "the other side"; that is, a fourth dimension where human beings enter into a world outside or parallel to our own. In the otherworld that Wells describes, it seems we can see others, observe their actions, yet be unable to speak, hear, or touch them.

Kate Chopin's The Story of an Hour is a classic example that some short stories can say all they need to do in just a short time. This story remains tantalizingly ambiguous, perhaps because so little is said, and so much merely hinted at.

What is worse: capital punishment or life in prison? You be the Judge.

Anna Katharine Green (1846 - 1935) was one of the crime novelists and paved the way for later female writers of detective novels, like Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is the first published collection of short stories featuring the famous consulting detective and his friend and colleague Dr. Watson.

Between 1896 and 1922, in addition to a series of full-length novels Lucy Maud Montgomery published over 140 short stories. In general, these tales are reflective of the coming of age themes and the sylvan settings which are explored in greater detail in the novels.

One of the most iconic TV series ever was Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone, which ran for five seasons on CBS from 1959 to 1964. This audiobook contains four short stories that inspired four episodes of The Twilight Zone: "The Bus Conductor" by E.F. Benson; "Elegy" by Charles Beaumont; "Time Enough at Last'' by Lynn Venable; and ''An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge'' by Ambrose Bierce. Read by award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti, one can understand why Searling was inspired by these short stories.

"Just room for one inside, sir," isn't quite as bone-chilling as hearing "room for one more, honey" in one of the Twilight Zone's most popular episodes, "Twenty Two." The Rod Serling masterpiece was inspired by E.F. Benson's "The Bus-Conductor". A ghost bears the chilling news instead of a recurring dream in Benson's chiller.

Herbert West, who is a medical student and later qualifies as a doctor, becomes obsessed with the possibility of reanimating corpses. Unfortunately, the revived subjects do not adapt to reintegration into society. West himself eventually becomes the victim of one of the homicidal zombies.

Lost in the snow on a bleak, wide moor in Northern England, a newlywed husband begins to despair he will ever see his wife again. He finds refuge with a pair of mysterious strangers, who direct him to a remote crossroads where the night mail coach is due to pass by. Amelia Ann Blanford Edwards (1831-1892) was a prolific journalist, traveler, and Egyptologist, as well as a hugely popular English novelist of the Victorian era.

Described by Virginia Woolf as "a little masterpiece", in Seven Men, Beerbohm tells the stories of six men from the world of the 1890s - Beerbohm himself is the seventh man - with such an air of realism and so much circumstantial detail as to blur the boundary between fact and fiction, so that the listener is lulled almost into acceptance of the fantastic events that he describes.