Showing results by publisher "Spoken Realms" in Short Stories

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

Although Anna Katharine Green was best known as a crime novelist, this anthology is essentially a collection of horror stories. The Old Stone House is the history of a disastrous love triangle involving a coquettish young girl and two ruthless men determined to win her heart. The other stories share the theme of a manipulative woman whose scheming places the people associated with her in difficult and unfamiliar situations.

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.

Krebs, Hemingway's protagonist, leaves home a college kid and returns a very changed man. This story explores the extremely changed family dynamics within the Krebs family when Harold returns home. Roles switch from parent-child to adult/adult.

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 X contains the following titles: The Christening; The Farmer's Wife; The Devil; The Snipe; The Will; Walter Schnaff's Adventure; At Sea; Minuet; and much more.

As tense, short story Westerns go, W.C. Tuttle's "Spawn of the Desert", set in the 1850s rugged Southwest mountains, is a splendid, fast-paced example of the classic genre of tales of gold and silver mining towns run by ruthless men, and inhabited by an eclectic population of miners, gamblers, gunmen, drunks, hardscrabble women, and the obligatory "colorful" characters. Tuttle (1883-1969) was one of the most prolific Western writers of his day, with more than 40 novels and short stories to his credit.

Giovanni Carmelo Verga (1840-1922) was one of the most prominent Sicilian writers of the 19th century. Today, his stories are best known through their use as the basis of the libretti of iconic verismo operas, like Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana.

In this gem of a short story, Edith Wharton's talent for satire shines. Mrs. Ballinger and the ladies of the Lunch Club, that exclusive group dedicated to literature and erudition, are eagerly anticipating a visit by the noted novelist Osric Dane. Her books have been read by all the members except their newest, Mrs. Roby, whose idea of a perfect novel is one that entertains and preferably ends with marriage for the hero and heroine. It's painfully clear to Mrs. Ballinger and the others that Mrs. Roby is not on their intellectual plane.

A tender and elegiac tale, William and Mary was first published in The Century Magazine in December 1920 (vol. 101).

"Azathoth" is the beginning of a never-completed novel written by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. It was written in June 1922 and published as a fragment in the journal Leaves in 1938, after Lovecraft's death. It is the first piece of fiction to mention the fictional being Azathoth, one of the major entities in Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, though the entity only appears in the title.

This collection of three stories was originally published in 1908 in Arabic under the title Al-Arwah Al-Mutamarridah. The English translation was first published in 1911. All are set in Lebanon, where the author spent the first 12 years of his life, and explore various aspects of love relationships.