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

The classic and heart warming tale which captures the zeitgeist of the mid-Victorian revival of the Christmas holiday. Dickens follows Ebenezer Scrooge, a curmudgeonly old man of business about whom a warm word is never said nor given back. One chilly Christmas eve, Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his old business partner who bears a dire warning, and a final chance to change his miserly ways.

Three disparate and suspenseful looks at ourselves in three very different worlds. These engaging short stories by three of the masters of American science fiction literature, Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Philip K. Dick, open windows into our psyches, our souls, and our surroundings that presage the world we find ourselves in today. Like episodes of The Twilight Zone, cinematic in their language and characters, the stories connect with our times in surprising ways.

Romantic comedy, light and slightly awkward by Henry James with his characteristic observations of character, motivations and relationships. Two young men, best friends, deeply interested in the same woman. The background is Europe at the turn of the century and the world of ex-pats. With time and several countries, they each discover love.

Ludovico is a despised second son, only child of a scorned second wife. He finds love with Viola, a peasant girl, and they have a son. Their happiness is threatened when Ludovico's older brother dies suddenly and he becomes the heir. His father, the proud and cruel prince of Mondolfo, will let nothing stand in the way of his legacy.

Guy de Maupassant, France's gift to the world of short stories, was a prolific writer of this genre. His complete collection numbers just under 200. Volume IX contains the following titles: Toine; Madame Husson's "Rosier"; The Adopted Son; Coward; Old Mongilet; Moonlight; The First Snowfall; Sundays of a Bourgeois; A Recollection; Our Letters; The Love of Long Ago; Friend Joseph; The Effeminates; and Old Amable.

A federal officer's best friend is mortally wounded but still alive and suffering terribly. He just euthanized an injured horse, but the rules are quite different and specific regarding humans. They are alone with no sign of help for the dying man. What to do?

In The Humour of America, 88 short stories, poems, anecdotes, and essays from the 18th and 19th century will keep you smiling and chuckling!

In the not-too-distant future, 2185 AD, anti-gerisone is the new drug that stops ageing. People are now living into their hundreds until it's time to take their own big trip up yonder, and in the case of the Ford family and Gramps, the notable patriarch, families are living and fighting together in one home for much longer. Eventually there are no prisons, slums, asylums, poverty, wars, or disease. and 200 years later the population of the US is set at 40 million people. But since no one gets any older, someone must volunteer to die if a baby is born.

Based in Oklahoma around 1889, a newly arrived couple learn about the local legends surrounding a "Snake God", Yig, who takes vengeance on anyone who kills a serpent by killing them or turning them into a half-snake monster. The husband has a snake phobia which isn't helped by the wife killing a nest of rattlesnakes.

In January 1817, Jane Austen began work on Sanditon, but died a few months later, leaving it unfinished. The surviving fragment begins the story of Charlotte Heywood, a sheltered young woman who is invited to the up-and-coming resort town of Sanditon. While there, she meets a host of memorable characters, drawn with Austen's classic wit and insight, including a fortune-hunting fop, a domineering dowager, and a hoard of hypochondriacs.

As in "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", Ambrose Bierce speculates on a person's final thoughts at the moment of death. An instant becomes a 30-minute short story. Bierce was an infantry officer in the Civil War and witnessed the deaths of many and no doubt contemplated his own; thus the fatalistic basis of much of his writing.

A friend of the narrator, a very brave but sometimes reckless lieutenant, is killed in action. The narrator becomes the possessor of a letter that he returns to the sender after the war is over. He finds the sender of the letter to be a very beautiful, sophisticated, but self-centered woman. So self-centered one wonders if she understands the meaning of the narrator's last words to her.

Guy de Maupassant, French master of the short story, had a simple, efficient style of writing and, like Anton Chekhov, found inspiration for his stories in the daily lives of humans, which often reveal our darker nature. Many of his works also centered on the Franco-Prussian War, in which he served. Volume VIII of his Complete Original Short Stories contains the following:

It's the American Civil War, two men and a horse on a high precipice. War requires ordinary men to make extraordinary decisions. This was particularly true in the American Civil War. Ambrose Bierce a veteran of that war spent much of the rest of his life writing short stories about it. This is one of his best narrated by award-winning audiobook narrator and producer Mike Vendetti.

Round the Fire was the title of a series of 12 mystery and suspense short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, published monthly in The Strand Magazine between June 1898 and May 1899. The series was popular with contemporary readers, and while some of the individual stories, such as "The Brown Hand", have been regularly anthologised for many years and are well-known, there are some overlooked gems here, too.

An award-winning audiobook narrator and producer reads Anton Chekhov's "The Beggar", a moral tale in which the arrogant and self-righteous lawyer thinks he has "saved" the beggar by teaching him how to work for a living. In fact, he would have never continued the original task (or even begun it) if it weren't for the example of the lawyer's compassionate cook, who quietly chopped the wood for him without expecting anything in return. It was Olga's example of self-sacrifice, not Skvortsoff's example of "do-goodism" that inspired the man to change his life.

Raconteurs Audio and Spoken Realms team up once again to bring this second collection of short stories by H. G. Wells to audio. Written between 1894 and 1902, this anthology of 13 stories delves into botany, flying machines, travel, distant lands and customs, virology, magic, taxidermy, journalism - and there’s even a ghost story.

Award-winning audiobook narrator and producer Mike Vendetti reads An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge a short story by Civil War veteran Ambrose Bierce. Described as "one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature". The story, which is set during the American Civil War, is known for its irregular time sequence and twist ending.

These stories are a unique, early study of celebrity and the vast emotional and social divisions of class and power that still exist today. Each story introduces a woman of power and the men who struggle to define them and thus themselves.

Ike Swift travels to New York's Chinatown where he describes the rise and fall of "The Queen of Chinatown".