Showing results by publisher "Spoken Realms" in United States

American author, scholar, and satirist H.L. Mencken wrote The American Language in 1919, intending to defend American speech from prescriptivist critics. "America itself is unutterably vulgar. But vulgarity, after all, means no more than a yielding to natural impulses in the face of conventional inhibitions, and that yielding to natural impulses is at the heart of all healthy language-making."

A collection of one-acts by the Pulitzer-winning playwright, including Close the Book, Suppressed Desires, Tickless Time, Woman's Honor, The People, and Trifles.

This collection was published in 1923 and won the Pulitzer Prize for the author in the following year. It is laid out in three main sections. The first is a lengthy poem, titled New Hampshire, the name being given to the entire collection. The second section bears the title "Notes", and consists of 14 poems, including the mini drama, "The Witch of Coös". The final section, which contains 30 poems, many of which are very short, is titled "Grace Notes."

This new audiobook features a collection of Service's very best and most beloved verses from his time living in and writing about the Klondike.

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.

Although best known for his short stories, H.P. Lovecraft considered himself a poet. These are five short poems by Lovecraft narrated by award-winning narrator and producer Mike Vendetti.

Award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti reads "The Bells" By Edgar Allan Poe. The poem has four parts; each part becoming darker and darker as the poem progresses from "the jingling and the tinkling" of the bells in part one to the "moaning and the groaning" of the bells in part four.

With charging rhythm and clarion language, in 14 stanzas, the poet conjures the dramatic, moving images of the rousing and pivotal ride of the famed patriot. Rhapsode Bob Gonzalez performs this classic.

One of the best-known poems in American literature, "Casey at the Bat", written in 1888 by Ernest Thayer and first published in The San Francisco Examiner on June 3, 1888, later popularized by DeWolf Hopper in many vaudeville performances.

This 1923 In Our Time collection consists of 18 vignettes. Five center on World War I (Chapters 1, 4, 5, 7, 8), and six on bullfighting (Chapters 2 and 12 to 16); the others center around news stories. Chapter 10 is the longest; it details a soldier's affair with a Red Cross nurse, and is based on Hemingway's relationship with Agnes von Kurowsky. The piece about a robbery and murder in Kansas City originated in a newspaper story Hemingway covered as a cub reporter at The Kansas City Star; it is followed by the story of the public hanging of a Chicago mobster.

Remember those biggies we loved in high school English? Well, here they are again performed by award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti. You'll hear "Chicago" by Carl Sandberg, "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne, "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" by Emily Dickinson, "Mending Wall" by Robert Frost, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats, "Song VII ("My song has put off her adornments")" by Rabindranath Tagore, and who can ever forget "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot.

Alice Gerstenberg (1885-1972) was an American playwright, actress, and activist. She is best known for her many feminist plays, which often feature female lead characters and all-female casts (a rare occurrence at the time). This is a collection of ten one-act plays, which cover a wide range of topics -highlights include a lighthearted farce involving gossiping women, a satire about dinner parties, and a comedy about the pretensions of conventional theater, but some plays also touch on more serious themes such as death, war, and the effects of an unhappy marriage.

Ten years after a tragic incident on the lake, an AA meeting in a small, religious town in the deep south of the USA descends into bitterness and chaos when a flood hits. Trapped within the local church, tempers escalate and well-buried secrets begin to emerge. Personalities clash, reputations are dissected and questioned, and everybody's demons are laid bare.

Floyd Dell has been called "one of the most flamboyant, versatile, and influential American Men of Letters of the first third of the 20th century". Though he was primarily a newspaper and magazine editor, most prominently of the radical left-wing magazine The Masses, he also published many best-selling feminist works. As a staunch advocate of feminism, socialism, psychoanalysis, and progressive education, his writing greatly shocked the American bourgeoisie at the time, to the point where it became so controversial, he was put on trial twice for his subversive literature.

New York-born John Kendrick Bangs was associate editor and then editor of Life and Harper magazines, eventually finding his way into the Humour department. Here, he began to write his own satire and humour. Ghosts I Have Met and Some Others is a delightful humorous collection of short tales relating encounters with ghosts, including "The Mystery of My Grandmother's Hair Sofa", "The Exorcism That Failed", and more.

"Mending Wall" is a poem by 20th-century American poet Robert Frost. It has become "one of the most anthologized and analyzed poems in modern literature."

This universalist spiritual treatise is the best known work by the Lebanese-born poet and artist Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931). The central figure of the narrative is a fictional prophet, Al Mustafa, who is about to set off on a journey back to his homeland. His departure is delayed when he encounters a group of people who urgently seek his advice on a wide range of topics ranging from the mundane to the highest flights of spiritual introspection.

Who among us would not wish the return of our lost loved one? Our narrator, while in the depths of grief for his "Lenore", is visited by a talking raven. Is this supernatural raven a voice from the other side, or is our narrator merely following a slow, sorrowful descent into madness?

In Keineth, a sheltered little girl who lives with her father and her French governess in New York City must choose between going to live with her stuffy aunt Josephine and a family of complete strangers. Her adventures are lively and interesting. Available here in audio for the first time, performed by professional actor and narrator Sara Morsey.

The Beautiful and Damned tells the story of Anthony Patch, a 1910s socialite and presumptive heir to a tycoon's fortune, and his courtship and relationship with his wife Gloria Gilbert. It describes his brief service in the Army during World War I, and the couple's post-war partying life in New York, and his later alcoholism.