Showing results by narrator "Mike Vendetti" in All Categories

This short story became possibly H.P. Lovecraft's favorite. Lots of things and possibilities going on here. A meteorite has crashed near a small farm west of Arkham, Massachusetts and strange things begin to happen. The life force seems to be being drained from living organisms near the well. The story is being told by a surveyor who is surveying the area prior to a damn being built that will flood the area with a lake. The potential problem is, the "thing" lives in the water of the well.

Award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti reads Acres of Diamonds, originally a lecture that Dr. Russell Conwell delivered in over 6,000 towns, villages, and cities.

One of the most iconic TV series ever was Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone, which ran for five seasons on CBS from 1959 to 1964. This audiobook contains four short stories that inspired four episodes of The Twilight Zone: "The Bus Conductor" by E.F. Benson; "Elegy" by Charles Beaumont; "Time Enough at Last'' by Lynn Venable; and ''An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge'' by Ambrose Bierce. Read by award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti, one can understand why Searling was inspired by these short stories.

"Jack and the Beanstalk" is an English fairy tale that appeared as "The Story of Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean" in 1734 and as Benjamin Tabart's moralized "The History of Jack and the Bean-Stalk" in 1807. Henry Cole, publishing under pen name Felix Summerly, popularized the tale in The Home Treasury (1845), and Joseph Jacobs rewrote it in English Fairy Tales (1890). Jacobs' version is most commonly reprinted today, and is believed to be closer to the oral versions than Tabart's because it lacks the moralizing.

Calling for staunch individualism, "Self-Reliance" is an 1841 essay written by American transcendentalist philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. It contains the most thorough statement of one of Emerson's recurrent themes: the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency and follow their own instincts and ideas. It is the source of one of Emerson's most famous quotations: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."

Part of Lovecraft's dream series, Celephaïs was created in a dream by Kuranes (which is his name in dreams - his real name is not given) as a child of the English landed gentry. As a man in his 40s, alone and dispossessed in contemporary London, he dreams it again and then, seeking it, slowly slips away to the dreamworld. Finally knights guide him through medieval England to his ancestral estate, where he spent his boyhood, and then to Celephaïs.

Why do you suppose some combat veterans give up the sport of hunting? Is it because they gain empathy with the hunted, or hunting a prey less cunning than they has lost its allure. Richard Connell, in this short story “The Most Dangerous Game” takes us where the hunter becomes the hunted. This hunter is not being hunted by a beast less cunning or calculating than he is, like a lion or a tiger. No, this hunter is a master at his craft, crueler and only slightly better armed than he is.

A priest and a dying atheist engage in a final dialogue. Reason vs. faith, and in the end...

As I listened to this, I couldn't help but compare Buggs and Ad to George and Lennie in Steinbeck's Mice and Men. Buggs protects Ad as George protected Lennie. Ad, though diminutive in size, as a former professional boxer could be as dangerous as Lennie when he had a crazy spell. Hemmingway portrays Buggs as the true leader of the group, highly intelligent, articulate, and gentle to his companion Ad while leading Ad to believe he is in charge.

"Youth" is a surprisingly complex short tale, with a deep core of thought-provoking reasoning. What is our motivation? Where is our growth? What do we consider valuable? These questions and more are brought to light in this story by Isaac Asimov. Youth is one of the rare Asimov stories with alien characters.

Bonnar had created the Green Queen thoughtlessly all part of a day's work. But when his brain-child became a full-grown Frankenstein, a monster embodied in the girl he loved, Bonnar was terrified. For now, she threatened to shatter the whole carefully balanced social structure of Viridis as well as to undermine that radioactive world's atomic shield! Only Bonnar could end the holocaust and turn the all-too-grim reality back to the illusion he had originally intended. But to do that he had to destroy the girl he loved—or be destroyed by her.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote the poem "Brahma" in 1856, synthesizing the essence of spirituality and Hinduism; exploring the mysteries of life and death. Robert Sheckley in his short story, "If The Red Slayer", a line taken from Emerson's poem takes us to a battlefield of the future where dead men can be brought back to life seen from the eyes of a soldier who has been killed three times and brought back to life three times.

Imagine everyone wearing a mask, and nobody talks. People communicate via a satchel full of printed responses.

Travel into the world of the occult and meet a Vampire in this short story by W. Adolphe Roberts narrated by Mike Vendetti.

Crowd-Horror by Robert E. Howard, narrated by Mike Vendetti as an audiobook, is the thrilling tale of a highly talented prize fighter as told by his manager. Highly talented until he is in front of a crowd.

Isaac Asimov, known primarily for his science fiction stories, was also a scientist. In cooperation with the Senior Scholastic magazine, he composed this wonderful and fascinating work of historical nonfiction. Twenty-six far-reaching discoveries and the twenty-nine scientists who made them—from Archimedes, who boasted he could move the world, to Goddard, who sent the first liquid-fuel rocket toward space.

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is a poem written in 1922 by Robert Frost and published in 1923 in his New Hampshire volume. Imagery, personification, and repetition are prominent in the work. In a letter to Louis Untermeyer, Frost called it "my best bid for remembrance".

Evil always seems to lurk in the world of H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s character stumbles into an area inhabited by evil spirits from another place disguised as a large strange tree. Even images of the tree can bring about madness.

It has always been the prerogative of genius to batter on the portals of the Unknowable - and then thrust his soul into the crack, like the little Dutch boy, to keep the devil out. The satanic legends surrounding the unbelievable career of the great concertist Paganini leave little doubt that somewhere there is a window such as Erich Zann's, beyond which lies a world more terrible than imagination can grasp, where science dwindles to zero and incredible passions rage as winds in a vacuum.

It was a dark and starless night when a schooner becalmed in the Northern Pacific is a approached by a rowboat whose occupant although nonthreatening refuses to be seen. We find out who this hideous appearing creature is, and how he and his fiancée came to be marooned on an island inhabited by a strange fungus.