Quiet Stories

In this episode we'll be reading two short stories by H.G. Wells - A Moonlight Fable and The Diamond Maker. These stories come from the collection, The Door in the Wall and Other Stories. We read the title story from this collection in episode 17, released on April 21, 2021.

In this episode we'll be reading Love of Life by Jack London, originally published in 1907. The American author is best known for his short stories and novels depicting the Klondike gold rush in northwestern Canada. This story is no exception and describes scenes of survival in the harsh northern landscape.

In this episode we'll be reading My Double and How He Undid Me by Edward Everett Hale. This story was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1859 and brought the American author immediate attention and praise. The son of Nathan Hale, the so-called inventor of the newspaper editorial, Edward Hale possessed strong literary skills from a young age and entered Harvard College when he was only 13 years old.

In this episode we'll be reading The Schoolmaster's Progress by the American author, Caroline Kirkland. This story was first published in her collection from 1845 titled Western Clearings. Kirkland is known for her depictions of frontier life and was a highly regarded author by her contemporaries such as Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Dickens.

In this episode we'll continue reading Stories of Old Greece and Rome by Emile Kip Baker. These stories use the Roman names for gods and goddesses. Some of the deities featured in these chapters along with their Greek names are Jupiter (Zeus), Juno (Hera), Neptune (Poseidon), Pluto (Hades), Minerva (Athena), and Apollo (Helios).

In this episode we'll be reading two short stories by Katherine Mansfield - The Singing Lesson and An Ideal Family. Regular listeners may recall we read another short story by Mansfield, The Garden Party, in episode 8. These stories are from the same collection, originally published in 1922.

In this episode we'll be reading the short story, The Door in the Wall by H.G. Wells. The English author is best known for his works of science fiction but was prolific in many styles including social commentary, satire, and history. This story explores the theme of fantasy versus reality that is prevalent in much of Wells' work.

In this episode we'll be reading the short story, Dalyrimple Goes Wrong by F. Scott Fitzgerald. This is third story we've read by Fitzgerald and the second we've read from Flappers and Philosophers, the author's first collection of short stories, originally published in 1920.

In this episode we'll be reading The Young King by Oscar Wilde. This is our second episode featuring the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde; our first was episode 7 which was released on February 10, 2021. This story comes from a collection of four fairy tales titled A House of Pomegranates, first published in 1891.

This week, by listener request, we'll be reading the first few chapters from Stories of Old Greece and Rome by Emile Kip Baker, published in 1913. If you would like to request a story you can email the podcast at info@thesoundpreserve.com. In this collection of myths, Baker took the stories found in Homer's poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, and made them more accessible by writing them in a prose format and updating the language.

In this episode we'll be reading the short story, The Adventure of the Western Star, from Poirot Investigates by Agatha Christie. This story, featuring Hercule Poirot, was first published in 1924 and was one of over fifty short stories and thirty-three novels by Christie featuring the egotistic, Belgian detective.

In this episode we'll be continuing our adventures with Phil and the woodland creatures of In Nature's School, by Lillian Gask. If you would like to listen to the first part of this story it is episode 6, released on February 3rd, 2021. When we left off, Phil was speaking with Father Beaver while keeping an eye on the banks for the Wolverine. At Father Beaver's suggestion, Phil heads out and visits the home of the musk rats, also known as ondatras.

In this episode we'll be reading two short stories by Guy de Maupassant – The Diamond Necklace and In the Spring. The French author was renowned as a master of the short story form and is best known for his surprise endings. Maupassant was a member of the Naturalist school – a literary movement that depicted characters and scenes realistically and often pessimistically as opposed to the unrealistic portrayals found in Romanticism, a preceding literary style.

In this episode we'll be reading The Red-Headed League, a Sherlock Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This short story was first published in The Strand Magazine in 1891. Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes character has been beloved since his first appearance in print in 1887. By 1927, the author had written 4 novels and 56 short stories featuring the observant detective.

In this episode we'll be reading three selections from Norse Tales for the Use of Children by Sir George Webbe Dasent, originally published in 1862. Dasent, born in the British West Indies and educated in London, became a scholar of Scandinavian stories after moving to Stockholm in 1840. He had a particularly strong interest in Icelandic culture and translated many works from Icelandic to English.

In this episode we'll be reading The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield, first published in 1922. Mansfield was born and raised in New Zealand but spent her adult life in England. She was a prolific author of short stories and poems although her career was cut short by her death from tuberculosis at the age of 34. After her death, her husband published four additional volumes of her works.

In this episode we'll be reading two children's stories with similar themes by Oscar Wilde - The Model Millionaire and The Happy Prince. Wilde is perhaps best known for his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray or his play, The Importance of Being Earnest, but his children's stories are beloved as well. The Irish author wrote these stories when his own sons were toddlers.

This week we'll be reading excerpts from In Nature's School, a children's story by Lilian Gask. This story tells the tale of Phil, a seven year old orphan, who, after suffering a brain fever at the orphanage, runs away to the woods and makes the acquaintance of several different animals.

This week, by listener request, we'll be reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story, The Ice Palace. If you would like to request a story you can email the podcast at info@thesoundpreserve.com or contact us through our website, thesoundpreserve.com. This story, first published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1920, references an Ice Palace built at the Winter Carnival in St. Paul, Minnesota. The first Ice Palace was built in St. Paul in 1885 and 37 Ice Palaces have been built there since.

In this episode we'll be reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, The Great Stone Face. Hawthorne's inspiration for the face-like rock formation in the story came from the real-life granite cliffs known as the Old Man of the Mountain which are located in New Hampshire. The formation collapsed in 2003 but has been memorialized as the New Hampshire state emblem since 1945.

In this episode we'll be reading two fairy tales from Hans Christian Andersen: The Elderbush and The Old House. Andersen wrote many novels, plays, poems, and travelogues but the Danish author is certainly best known for his fairy tales. Early reviews of his fairy tales called them too informal and dialog heavy but now we can appreciate this is the very aspect of his style that makes his tales so timeless and enjoyable for children and adults alike.

In this episode we'll be reading the short story, “The Lees of Happiness,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The story was originally published in The Chicago Sunday Tribune in 1920 – the same year as Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise. The author stated that he feared the story “would be accused perhaps of being a mere piece of sentimentality, but,” as he saw it, “it was a great deal more.”

In this episode we'll be reading the story of the Race for the Silver Skates from Hans Brinker; or, the Silver Skates: A Story of Life in Holland by Mary Mapes Dodge. The novel, about a Dutch boy, Hans Brinker, and his sister, Gretel, was published by the American author in 1865 – before she had visited the Netherlands. Dodge based her stories of Dutch culture and landscapes on stories told to her by Dutch friends and extensive research on on the country.