Showing results by narrator "MIke Vendetti" in All Categories

Award-winning narrator and producer Mike Vendetti reads Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem that is so well-known, the loop road leading close to Norman’s Woe from Route 127 is named Hesperus Ave. You will hear the wind blowing past the mast to which the captain has tied his daughter to keep her from being blown overboard.

H.P. Lovecraft blends horror with science fiction in this short story first published in Weird Tales. The isolated hills of Vermont were always suspected of being haunted in the 1920s, but we learn not by ghosts. For eons they have been visited by extraterrestrials. Left alone they were not a problem, but too close and trouble would erupt. This is a very dark tale.

"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.

This is a very erotic tale narrated in a sexy baritone certain to titillate the erotic desires of the listener or listeners. Told in the first person, the protagonist is a 15-year-old possessing a large penis, much virility, and a seemingly insatiable sexual appetite. He describes his sexual initiation as an adolescent - as he is "approaching 15". He catalogs his sexual experiences including incest with his sisters Eliza and Mary, sex with his governess, in addition to a very experienced and voluptuous older woman who initiates him into the rights of Venus.

Henry, or the youth as Crane refers to him leaves his home a naïve boy with visions of grandeur and glory; yet he runs from his first battle only to later join the walking wounded as an imposter. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage. He falls in with men who will shortly die from their wounds. One, a spectral soldier with a terrible wound, turns out to be his friend Jim Conklin.

Eric Branson and his team have dealt their enemies a decisive blow, wiping out an entire unit of rogue soldiers and liberating refugees from the largest detention camp in the region.

Where do jokes come from? Using a mighty computer called "Multivavac", Noel Meyerhof, a Grand Master, asks two questions of Multivac after feeding it all the jokes he knows to find where they came from. Would you believe extraterresterials?

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.

This 1937 version of Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill has helped millions of people achieve success and riches. It has been the go-to text of nearly every successful person since it was published at the end of the Great Depression. Andrew Carnegie commissioned Mr. Hill to interview over 500 millionaires to find a success formula that could be used by the average person to achieve success.

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

The Lurking Fear - even the title could invoke fear. Fear could lurk anywhere, but in this H. P. Lovecraft short story, written in 1922, by a narrator who describes himself as "a connoisseur in horrors", it lurks in a haunted house in upstate New York. Listen to this tale on a dark and stormy night... if you dare.

"Three-Day Blow'' is a short story that became a chapter from In Our Time. Jake (Hemingway's alter ego) hikes to his friend Bill's house where they spend the morning talking and drinking. The conversation is mostly chit-chat until the liquor loosens them up enough to discuss Jakes's breakup with Marjorie.

There have been no wolves in this region of France for many years, but now an extremely viscious rogue is terrorizing the local peasantry who say it is a werewolf. Monsieur Etienne Delacroix knows better, but he arms his sons with silver bullets just in case.

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.

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.

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.

"Abolish Language," said the vizier, "And man will return to primal simplicity and happiness."

"Azathoth" is the beginning of a never-completed novel written by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. It was written in June 1922 and published as a fragment in the journal Leaves in 1938, after Lovecraft's death. It is the first piece of fiction to mention the fictional being Azathoth, one of the major entities in Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, though the entity only appears in the title.

Narrated by Mike Vendetti and Kathy Verduin, Cat in the Rain is not just about a cat. The cat can be taken at face value and surface-level as "just" a cat, and the events of the story as being a minor snapshot into one hour's events in the lives of an American couple living in 1920s Italy. But since when in our own lives do events simply happen without having wider implications? Many things we do are motivated by other desires, drives, wants, fears, and anxieties.

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.