Showing results by publisher "Simply Media" in Anthologies

Four of Oscar Wilde's best stories - perhaps his best work of all. In any case, these selections are well worth hearing for their wide range of thoughts, emotions, and wit. An afterword is included for those interested. (American accent narration.)

"The Ransom of Red Chief" may be the most widely read story in grammar, middle, and high school. Young people can relate to 10-year-old Red Chief, his father, who makes the kidnappers pay him back in order to take Red Chief off their hands....

"To Be Read at Dusk" is one of Dickens better ghost/phantasm stories, complete with disappearances and people lost forever through other worldly influences or death. A story within a story told by couriers, go-betweens in the age of Dickens.

"A Faint Heart" is a testament to the author's brilliant sense of style and subtle sense of psychology. Two men have a passionate and loving relationship but are not homosexuals. The narrative is about a young clerk who can not reconcile his own personal happiness at marrying a lovely young woman while the rest of the world is not equally as happy. He winds up institutionalized and his beloved marries another, but falls to the ground weeping when meeting his dear friend two years later.

Considered one of the great American short stories; Kurt Vonnegut said it was the best. Set in the Civil War with a Southwestern humor twist worthy of Mark Twain, but much grimmer. The story of betrayal as a Northern Scout in the Civil War lures a planter to blow up a bridge so he can be caught and hanged. Short, concise, worthy.

God Sees the Truth, But Waits engages a subject that would have suited Dostoyevsky. But Dostoyevsky would have written it with a tone of fist-waving anger and frustration, while Tolstoy wrote this story with an accepting, non-violent attitude toward the grievances described. The protagonist has been wrongly accused of murder, separated from his family for 26 years, and by circumstance meets the real murderer in Siberia.

"The Holly Tree" is a warm Christmas story by Charles Dickens and a listening treat for adults during the holiday season or almost any time of year. Full of wonderful Dickensian words, phrases, and irony. The story contains a strain of great truth, and love for Americans, who Dickens depicts over-friendly but warm, kindly, generous, and warm hearted.

"Paul's Case" was first published in 1905 in Cather's first collection of short stories, titled The Troll Garden. Similar to "The Enchanted Forest" featured in her Nine Stories published by Simply, it is one of the great writer's stories accessible to most young people in high school and college. It relates to what they feel, think, and want to be. Perhaps just as importantly, it depicts young people upset by their current circumstances, their families, and the drabness they perceive in their own lives.

Young readers enjoy this story a lot, because of the safecracking plot. Adults tend to like the growing up part: starting a shoe store, succeeding, getting the girl, and going straight.

"An Experiment in Misery" in a story similar to "The Men in the Storm" except that it focuses on one character, and a new fellow traveler called the Assassin, who struggle for warmth and a place for the night. The main character stops first at a saloon for free soup with a beer, where he meets the Assassin. The Assassin accosts the man seeking a few cents for a room.

Chickamauga is a heart-rending Civil War story told through the eyes of a lost boy. The child bears witness to the atrocities of war. He sees dying men crawling across the ground, and later returns to his old homestead, only to find it has been largely destroyed. A must read for people interested in the Civil War and Americana in general, this short story by Ambrose Bierce sheds new light war and its aftermath.

>"The Queer Client" is a desolate story about death and revenge. The tragedy of the story is that every character in the story dies or loses - or both. "The Queer Client" is a remarkable and powerful work about the grim realities of debtor's prison and the fertile ground for despair and revenge found therein. Read by an American voice, by listener request.

"Flanagan" is a story not dissimilar from "The Open Boat", except that the captain dies in "Flanagan" but not in the "Open Boat". Flanagan is hired to take a ship, aptly named the Foundling, down to Cuba to run guns and people into that country. He does so in a rickety old boat and does a good job. A gun boat finds them and barrels at them at top speed. Rather than just running, the natural instinct, Flanagan turns his ship towards the small gun boat, an unexpected chess move....

Mark Twain, America's acknowledged greatest writer of fiction, was a master of writing short stories as well as novels. Twain influence almost every subsequent American writer from Hemingway and Fitzgerald, to Cather and Robert Frost. These are four of his best short stories, starting with his most famous, "The Notorious Frog", and including three of his other favorites.

>"Killed at Resaca" is the story of a brave man, loved by his fellow soldiers and driven by a heartless, beautiful woman. Full of Bierce's infamous sense of outrage and morality, this is a classic Civil War story.

"The Monster" is considered one of Crane's top four stories, but is left out of many collections. Don't miss it. It's a wonderful telling about the town of Whilomville, in which Henry Johnson lives and other Crane stories are set as well, including "The Knife".

Winesburg, Ohio has the most memorable cast of characters in 20th-century fiction. Listeners will remember at least a few stories and their characters for the rest of their lives. Each of the 23 stories stands on its own. And each is also interwoven into the fabric of the book.

"The Knife" is a story about temptation, a near betrayal, and then a recovery. A cycle of danger and redemption, told with Crane's ironic touch. A black man with a penchant for fun jokes with the White owner of a watermelon patch. They both enjoy the racial stereotyping image of the black man being entranced by watermelons. Well, Peter Washington has a moment of such entrancement. He tells his friend Alek Williams and they work themselves into a fit of envy about those watermelons....

"The Queen of Spades" is the best known and probably the best of all Russian short stories. It confronts the great riches of a few and the impoverishment of the many in the form of the assistant to the fabulously rich and old Countess; Hermann, who seeks great wealth through any means; and the countess's knowledge of how to win one's fortune on three cards. The denouement is worthy of being considered one of the finest in literature.

Willa Cather was perhaps most famous for her great novels such as My Antonia and Death Comes to the Archbishop. However, her short stories were enchanting and practical, local and cosmopolitan. Of the great American writers of the early part of the twentieth century she stood alone in her vision. No American writer ever had her breadth of experience and knowledge of people and places, relating to farmers in Nebraska, to barons in New York, and artists in Paris.