Showing results by narrator "Mike Vendetti" in All Categories

"The Raven" and other poems suitable for the 10th and 11th grades.

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.

A collection of over 30 poems for the entire family from kindergarten to adult. The majority of this poetry is from Common Core Appendix B: Text Exemplars and Sample Performance Tasks.

"Annabel Lee" tells the story of young love cut short by tragedy. As the speaker (often assumed to be based on Poe himself, whose young wife died shortly before he wrote this poem) discusses his relationship with the now-deceased Annabel Lee, he presents the love between them as pure, eternal, and all-conquering. The love between the speaker and Annabel Lee may have been short-lived, but it remains too powerful to be defeated, even by death. Through describing this intensely idealized love, the poem argues that love is the strongest force on earth.

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.

College freshmen have dissected this poem for ages, but it takes an older person to understand it.

An Oscar Wilde story for children where a beautiful, golden, jewel-studded statue and a little swallow give all they have to help the poor.

A short touching story about a man who is poor but becomes rich through an act of kindness.

Probably one of the most dissected seduction poems ever written, "To His Coy Mistress" is a metaphysical poem written by the English author and politician Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) either during or just before the English Interregnum (1649-60). It was published posthumously in 1681. This poem is considered one of Marvell's finest and is possibly the best recognized carpe diem poem in English. Although the date of its composition is not known, it may have been written in the early 1650s.

As we grow older and look back upon our lives, there are moments and decisions in those moments that changed our lives forever. Carpe diem, or seize the moment. Did we seize the right moment? These are nine poems that suggest the poet is remembering moments past.

"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love", known for its first line, "Come live with me and be my love," is a poem written by the English poet Christopher Marlowe and published in 1599 (six years after the poet's death). In addition to being one of the best-known love poems in the English language, it is considered one of the earliest examples of the pastoral style of British poetry in the late Renaissance period. The poem was the subject of a well-known "reply" by Walter Raleigh, called "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd".

As well as writing Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson also wrote the perennially popular A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), a collection of poems for younger readers. Many of Stevenson's greatest poems were included in that volume. Award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti recites six of these favorites including "Looking-Glass River", "My Shadow", and "Sing Me a Song of a Lad that is Gone".

"A Visit from St. Nicholas", more commonly known as "The Night Before Christmas" and "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" from its first line, is a poem first published anonymously in 1823 and later attributed to Clement Clarke Moore, who claimed authorship in 1837.

His power came from some great reservoirof spiritual life, else it could not have been so universal and so potent....

Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years in prison, part of which he spent in Reading Gaol. About five months after Wilde arrived at Reading Gaol, Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards, was brought to Reading to await his trial for murdering his common-law wife (and promptly presenting himself and confessing to a policeman) on 29 March 1896; on 17 June, Wooldridge was sentenced to death and returned to Reading for his execution, which took place on Tuesday, 7 July 1896 - the first hanging at Reading in 18 years. The poem is dedicated to him.

The Christmas Banquet mentioned in the title is an annual feast, funded by an old misanthrope, in which the 10 most miserable people who can be found are gathered together for the holiday. Each year the guests chosen are different, but Gervaise Hastings, a man unafflicted by any obvious misfortune, is included year after year.

Temptation looms large in love poetry and religious poetry, but over the centuries, poets have described and explored the topic of temptation from a variety of different perspectives, choosing some very unusual metaphors to illustrate the dangers - or the delights - of temptation. Here are six all-time favorites.

Thought by many to be the greatest Christmas story ever written. Award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti takes us to a shabby apartment where love rules. This is a Christmas story but worth a listen any time of the year.

Award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti reads Edgar Alan Poe's classic The Pit and the Pendulum, taking us back to the Spanish Inquisition. Vendetti's performance takes us into the dungeon where we can all but feel the sharp edge of the deadly pendulum brushing across our body, hear the ravenous rats scurrying about the cell, and worst of all, the final terror. The panic of Poe's narrator becomes palpable as you listen to this classic tale so well-narrated.

Eric Branson is still weeks from reaching his daughter in Colorado, but an opportunity to get there a whole lot faster has him participating in business he wanted no part of when he returned to the homeland. Just like in the old days, things change and go downhill fast when the action begins, and the mission he's agreed to will test even a war-hardened SEAL and private contractor.