Showing results by narrator "Mike Vendetti" in All Categories

"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.

Who is Mercer? Coyote. Soul Smuggler. A body-hopping, phantasmal anti-hero. A disenfranchised spirit doomed to inherit the earth, cursed by both heaven and hell. An enemy of god, but no friend of the devil. Soul Smuggler collects nine Mercer tales.

Isaac Asimov wrote "The Magnificent Possession" early in his career. This is one of the few humorous stories that Asimov created.

Ichabod Crane, a city slicker from Connecticut becomes the pedagogue (teacher) of a small school in the Catskills of New York. Interestingly enough the area is haunted by a Hessian trooper who was beheaded by a cannonball, and he roams at night, probably in search of his head. When Ichabod attempts to woo the only daughter of a wealthy farmer, he must contend with a local hero. This classic American short story has been a staple in classrooms for well over 100 years.

A poke at idioms, sci-fi style. If we read everything literally, we'd go mad.

Masterfully read by award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti, travel to the town of Hamelin suffering from a rat infestation, when a piper dressed in multicolored ("pied") clothing appeared, claiming to be a rat-catcher. He promised the mayor a solution to their problem with the rats. The mayor, in turn, promised to pay him for the removal of the rats (according to some versions of the story, the promised sum was 1,000 guilders). The piper accepted and played his pipe to lure the rats into the Weser River, where they all drowned. The rest is a legend enjoyed for centuries.

We travel with The Hawk, or Carl Ericson, son of Norwegian immigrants, born at the end of the 19th century, through the first three adventurous periods of the young man's life. We see him as an adventurous boy, running away with Gertie Cowels, the girl that lives in the big house in the better part of town, only to be rescued by Bone Stillman, a backwoods philosopher and influence on Carl. He leaves his childhood, Gertie and Joralemon behind, for a short attempt at higher education, then to pursue the hobo life, a Bowery bartender, an engineer in Panama, and an aviator.

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.

The Science of Getting Rich is a classic, written by Wallace D. Wattles, and published in 1910. Wattles died in 1911 shortly after publishing this book. Forgotten for decades, it was recently rediscovered. Award winning storyteller Mike Vendetti brings us the timeless principles in this classic that will transform your financial future.

She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen...so pliant...so yeilding..so all-enfolding....

The scene is a rundown boardwalk with carnival attractions. Ralph Banghart manages a house of mirrors where the "Dwarf", Mr. Bigelow, comes to view himself as large, normal. Ralph Banghart is a bully, and when his friend, Aimee, takes pity on Mr. Bigelow, Ralph becomes jealous. Although his bullying had been behind Mr. Bigelow's back, Ralph decides to switch the mirror in the house of mirrors to one that makes Bigelow appear tiny instead of large.

Anyone who has to spend the better part of his days chained to a routine job in our workaday world will appreciate the sorcery that captured the heart of Mr. Sladden. That gentleman's experience in finding a private peep-hole out of this world is one we all may envy.

This is a happy, feel-good tale by Lord Dunsany aka Edward Plunkett, the 18th Baron of Dunsany. Read by award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti, the wild things take you into their world.

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.

There comes a time in the course of a battle when a soldier leaves his fate in the hands of the Gods of war. He carries on with the battle at hand, the only way he knows how - fight now, think later. Stephen Cranes’ classic novel ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ offers us an insight into the mind of a young soldier. As he delves into the black depths of both PTSD and trauma, Cranes’ striking descriptions and masterful prose make this captivating novel unmissable for fans of Jack London, John Steinbeck, and Edith Wharton.

How far would you go to get your family out if you were convinced that America was doomed? Would you build an underground bunker and stockpile it with ammunition and supplies? Buy a cabin in the woods and start growing all your own food? Not if you were obsessed with boats the way Terry Bailey is obsessed. Terry has an escape plan to sail to the very ends of the earth; the only real option left to survive what's coming, according to him.

Lincoln's carefully crafted address came to be seen as one of the greatest and most influential statements of American national purpose. In just 271 words, beginning with the now-iconic phrase "Four score and seven years ago", referring to the signing of the Declaration of Independence 87 years earlier, Lincoln described the US as a nation "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal", and represented the Civil War as a test that would determine whether such a nation, the Union sundered by the secession crisis, could endure.

Meet the Otis family: Mister and Missus and their four children - Washington, the twins called Stars and Stripes, and their daughter Virginia. They've just moved from America and into the English country manor of Canterville Chase. Though rumors persist that the house is haunted, the Otis' have none of it and set about making the house their own. Then comes the mysterious clanking chains and the bloodstains on the floor, and soon even the Otis family must come face-to-face with that most feared of creatures - the Canterville Ghost.

"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.

Award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti recites this timeless nursery rhyme.