Showing results by publisher "Spoken Realms" in United States

The Waste Land by T. S Eliot is narrated by Danielle Cohen and Denis Daly. Eliot's cross-cultural epic poem, first published in 1922, remains one of the most challenging poems in the English language. It is dedicated to Eliot's mentor, Ezra Pound. Like Pound, Eliot reveled in drawing allusions and quotations from a vast body of world literature.

Spoon River Anthology is a collection of poems that describe life - and death - in a small town. Each poem is a monologue delivered by a resident of Spoon River, describing events in their lives, and the circumstances that led to their occasionally untimely end. Edgar Lee Masters wrote this theatrical masterpiece to highlight the typical small town. The fascinating characters and realistic imagery make it easy to see why this is an American classic.

Harmonium was American poet Wallace Stevens's first book, published when he was 44 years old. It represents his complete poetic output up to that point in his life. It is now considered a masterpiece, one of the great contributions to literary Modernism. It is a mixture of pure, rational, philosophical thought, and imaginary nonsense-verse. It is striking in its diversity and includes some of Stevens' best known and most-loved poems.

In the blistering heat of rural Mississippi, the Bundren family loads their dead matriarch, Addie, into a handmade coffin and sets out on a bleak, often darkly comic journey to bury her in her hometown of Jefferson. Each mile of flooded rivers, broken bones, starving mules, and simmering resentments peels back another layer of this family's grief, faith, and desperation, as husband Anse and children Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman tell the story in their own, often clashing voices.

In this award-winning screenplay, Bee Haden convinces her son, Tom, to drive with her from Los Angeles to Cape Cod. On the road they eventually discover that love is the only thing we can really give our children.

Possibly one of the most dissected poems ever, Eliot's poem loosely follows the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King combined with vignettes of contemporary British society. Eliot employs many literary and cultural allusions from the Western canon, Buddhism, and the Hindu Upanishads. The poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy featuring abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location, and time and conjuring a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures.

The Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters, narrated by the award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti and professional actress Kathy Verduin, is a collection of short free-verse poems that collectively narrates the epitaphs of the residents of Spoon River, a fictional small town named after the Spoon River, which ran near Masters' home town of Lewistown, Illinois.

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) was one of the most prominent members of the Imagist movement, a brief flowering of modernist poetry, in which Ezra Pound was also involved. Williams was also an accomplished painter and art critic. Imagist verse is characterized by a distinct economy of verbiage and freedom of rhythm. Sour Grapes was his fourth collection of poetry and was published in 1921. As with much of Williams' early works, critical acclaim was slow in coming. Today, the collection is considered to contain some of his most significant poems.

The poems in this collection, "Fairies and Fusiliers", appeared in 1918, after Robert Graves returned from World War I in his early 20s. The fairy poems are from the carefree happy days of childhood and make-believe recalled by a man who has lived the reality and horror of war. The poems of war are written only as one who has witnessed it can tell them.

An Ideal Husband is an 1895 comedy by Oscar Wilde which revolves around blackmail and political corruption, and touches on the themes of public and private honor. The action is set in London, and takes place over the course of 24 hours.

A man loses his only child in a car accident. But has she really gone? Why does he keep hearing her voice?

A classic tale of doomed romance, Longfellow's classic epic poem reminds us that man's inhumanity to man and refugees have been with us many centuries. The story of how the Cajuns came to Louisiana is only a part of this moving, evocative poem. Two lovers separated by a cruel fate stand against a canvas of America in the making.

The sudden death of the father of the family results in the drastic reduction of the Careys' income and they must leave their comfortable home in Boston. Nancy Carey, the eldest, recalls a vacation in Maine when they all picnicked in the garden of a big, vacant house that her father loved. She discovers that the house is available, the rent is cheap, and persuades her mother that life in The Yellow House in Beulah, Maine is the perfect place to begin their new life.

This suspenseful novella focuses on the dark secret that haunts the aristocratic Trevlyn family since the untimely death of Sir Richard Trevlyn. His widow keeps the key to the mystery inside a locket, which she never takes off. When a charming stranger with ulterior motives gains access to Lady Trevlyn and her young daughter, will he unlock the family secrets along with their hearts? Fans of Alcott’s Little Women and her heroine Jo March’s racy stories will delight in this Victorian sensation novel.

Lewis Vickers, a young American languishing in South America because he is “wanted” for a crime that was the result of an accident, comes across another American—Hobart Lee who greatly resembles him. That man dies and Vickers, to get back to the United States, decides to impersonate him. He is taken to the family group upon his arrival in New York City and soon finds himself embroiled in a situation he cannot just walk away from—no matter how badly he wants to. Who was this “Bob” Lee and why does his cousin seem to hate him so?

J. Franklin Jameson helped found the American Historical Association (1884), and was the first managing editor of the American Historical Review. He also wrote The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (1926) and invited W. E. B. Du Bois to present a paper concerning Reconstruction at the 1909 AHA meeting. With Waldo Leland, he started lobbying Congress to create the National Archives, the building for which was first funded in 1926.

A Generation of American Historiography by William A. Dunning is a nice overview of book trends and the histories and historians in the decades (a generation) prior to 1900, when most historians were male and white, of course … but not all.

Whether intended as historical fiction or not, this tale of a California bandit in the early years of the Gold Rush by America's first Native American novelist was based on real occurrences. By early 1853, a certain "Joaquin" was being blamed for seemingly every murder and robbery in the young Golden State—a Robin Hood-like figure originally from Mexico said to be an inspiration a half a century later for the character of Zorro (who in turn was an influence on masked vigilante and avenger characters like Batman).

Enough Rope was Dorothy Parker's first published collection of poems, and was a best seller. The Nation described her verse as "caked with a salty humor, rough with splinters of disillusion, and tarred with a bright black authenticity."

There’s a story behind every farewell. In Three Viewings, award-winning playwright Jeffrey Hatcher explores love, money, and loss in a trio of mordantly witty narratives. In a small-town funeral parlor, three stories portray the extent to which we all hold on to memories, money, life, and love.