Kitty Hendrix – Spoken Realms

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Jovana — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 19:00:00 +0000

100 years ago and before there were Instagram Influencers, there was Lorelei Lee, a wily blonde from Little Rock, Arkansas, and her BFF Dorothy, who took New York and Europe by storm in 1925, reporting in her diary every detail of their quest to collect the greatest trove of jewels, gowns, men, and adventures imaginable.

In her “Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady,” Lorelei hopes you will enjoy this rendition of her tales of conquest and coquetry, complete with musical interludes and surprising sound effects on the 100th Anniversary of its publication.

Audible/Amazon

You Are Your Own Best Teacher!

Jovana — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 17:45:00 +0000

You Are Your Own Best Teacher! provides a remarkable variety of teachable antidotes to the punishing forces bearing down on youngsters from harmful marketing, the insidious grip of “virtual reality,” and the tyranny of peer groups.

Apprehensive parents and burdened teachers will delight in the lessons of this book for tweens (nine to twelve-year-olds). It will spark their innate curiosity, imagination, and idealism.

Tweens, who are whipsawed by relentless distractions, profit-driven manipulations, and oncoming addictions, are guided toward elevating their own sense of significance, protection, and realizable achievements. Through this process of discovery, they explore wider frames of reference with roles inside and outside the family environment.

With a calming sense of humor, Nader’s You Are Your Own Best Teacher! will bring out the best in our inherently eager youngsters. This book showcases refreshing connections between parents and children and reveals many serious shortcomings of formal education, which can be easily remedied.

Amazon/Audible • iTunes

The Book of Dragons

Jovana — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 18:45:00 +0000

The Book of Dragons is a collection of children’s stories by English writer Edith Nesbit, who wrote under the name E. Nesbit in order to obscure her gender.

Comprising eight stories originally published in 1899 in The Strand magazine, The Book of Dragons is a work that explores the magic and wonder of mythical beasts for children and adults alike.

The dragons are hardly ever nice, but E. Nesbit’s children are undeterred. Always in favor of “valuing their opinions, honoring the realities of their inner lives, and giving them the freedom to explore and build worlds of their own,”* Edith Nesbit portrays her children to be great problem-solvers.

We hope you will enjoy the re-telling of these wonderful stories with accompanying musical interludes, to perhaps bring you to some enchanted, peaceful place where everything almost always turns out for the best.

*The New Yorker Magazine: Jessica Winter, September 28, 2022

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Youth and the Bright Medusa

Jovana — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 17:08:00 +0000

This collection of short stories or “portraits” of artists – in the world of opera, the theater, and art, in New York and on the international stage – written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Willa Cather was published in 1920.

These stories are a unique, early study of celebrity and the vast emotional and social divisions of class and power that still exist today. Each story introduces a woman of power and the men who struggle to define them and thus themselves.

What became of women who achieved power in the 1900s? And what became of those who abused it? As Ms. Cather says at the closing of “Coming Aphrodite!”: “A big career takes its toll, even with the best of luck.”

The following stories included here are:

Chapter one: “Coming, Aphrodite!”
Chapter two: “The Diamond Mine”
Chapter three: “A Gold Slipper”
Chapter four: “Paul’s Case”
Chapter five: “A Death in the Desert”

Amazon/Audible • iTunes

A Lost Lady

Jovana — Thu, 18 Apr 2019 17:32:44 +0000

A Lost Lady by Willa Cather is the story of Captain Daniel Forrester and his wife Marian who live in the western town of Sweet Water, along the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1920s.

Neil Herbert, a boy who grows up in Sweet Water, admires the Captain and his beautiful, vivacious wife, who have the genteel lifestyle of small-town aristocrats and entertain powerful men.

As Captain Forrester’s fortune and health decline, Neil becomes aware of a different Mrs. Forrester, one who succumbs to alcohol and opportunistic men. He is torn by his desire to save Mrs. Forrester along with his treasured memories of better times, but cannot turn back the clock to an idealized age of noble pioneers as the American West makes its way for a new age of capitalist exploitation.

Willa Cather was an American writer who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918). In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I.

Amazon/Audible • iTunes

https://samples.audible.com/bk/mike/002654/bk_mike_002654_sample.mp3

Kate Chopin Selected Short Stories, Volume I

Jovana — Sun, 21 Jan 2018 18:50:46 +0000

Kate Chopin, one of the great literary writers of 19th-century American fiction, was a woman ahead of her time.

From the early 1890s, Chopin was writing short stories, articles, and translations which appeared in periodicals and magazines regionally based in St. Louis – she was perceived as a “local color” writer, but her literary qualities were discounted.

Much of her writing was autobiographical. She took into account her ancestry of Irish and French descent, and her years with Creole and Cajun influences in Louisiana.

When her novel, The Awakening, was published in 1899, with themes of sexual and social independence for women, it was met with negative criticism and banned in several states. Chopin, discouraged by the criticism and realizing that she had not been accepted as the legitimate author she knew she was, turned to short story writing almost exclusively for the rest of her life. Volume 1 includes the following short stories: “Beyond The Bayou”; “Ma’Ame Pelagie”; “Desiree’s Baby”; “A Respectable Woman”; “The Kiss”; “A Pair of Silk Stockings”; “The Locket”; and “A Reflection”.

Amazon/Audible • iTunes

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The Awakening

Jovana — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 18:14:33 +0000

The Awakening, a novel by Kate Chopin, was first published in 1899. Set in New Orleans and on the Louisiana Gulf Coast at the end of the 19th century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle between her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American South. It is widely seen as a landmark work of early feminism with themes that are still relevant today.

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The Forerunner

Jovana — Sat, 22 Jul 2017 17:26:28 +0000

Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883-April 10, 1931) was a Lebanese-American artist, poet, and writer whose inspiring works are still widely read and enjoyed throughout the world.
The Forerunner, published in 1920, was written three years before Kahlil Gibran’s best-known work, The Prophet, and is a book composed of his developing spiritual ideas of both poetry and prose.
Gibran’s popularity grew markedly during the 1960s, with the American counterculture and then with the flowering of the New Age movement. His work has remained popular with these and with the wider population to this day.
Since The Prophet was first published in 1923, it has never been out of print, has been translated into more than 40 languages, and is one of the best-selling books of the 20th century in the United States.
The Forerunner was released into the public domain in April of 2017.

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Youth

Jovana — Tue, 11 Jul 2017 17:42:59 +0000

Slim is a boy whose astronomer father is visiting the country estate of an important industrialist. The industrialist’s son, Red, has found two strange animals, and he enlists Slim in a plan to turn the animals into a circus act.
The astronomer, meanwhile, tells the industrialist that he has been in contact with space aliens who want to open up their world to interstellar trade. Their world needs help, the astronomer says; ever since the atomic wars that destroyed their old civilization, their world has been regressing. Unless something is done, their culture may face total collapse.
“Youth” by Isaac Asimov, first appeared in the May 1952 issue of Space Science Fiction and was reprinted in the 1955 collection The Martian Way and Other Stories. “Youth” is one of the rare Asimov stories with alien characters.

Amazon/Audible • iTunes

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The Search After Hapiness

Jovana — Fri, 30 Jun 2017 17:39:37 +0000

The Search After Hapiness was written by Charlotte Brontë when she was 13 years old. It tells the story of a man named Henry O’Donell who leaves his home to seek happiness only to find many years later that it was there all along.
This manuscript was one of many tiny handwritten booklets produced by the Brontë children, originally written so that in the imaginary world the siblings created, they could be read by Branwell’s (Charlotte’s brother’s) toy soldiers.
The story is rare in that it contains Charlotte’s earliest known poem. Charlotte Brontë is best known as the author of the classic novel Jane Eyre.

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Daisy Miller

Jovana — Thu, 29 Jun 2017 17:27:58 +0000

Daisy Miller portrays the courtship of a beautiful American girl by Winterbourne, a sophisticated compatriot of hers. His pursuit of her is hampered by her own flirtatiousness, which is frowned upon by the other expatriates when they meet in Switzerland and Italy.
Henry James uses Daisy’s story to discuss what he thinks Europeans and Americans believe about each other, and more generally the prejudices common in any culture.
Daisy Miller was an immediate and widespread popular success for James, despite some criticism that the story was “an outrage on American girlhood”. The story continues to be one of James’ most popular works, along with The Turn of the Screw and The Portrait of a Lady.
This narration is from the original text which was published in 1879. In 1909 Henry James published a second version of Daisy Miller, which in spite of his preferring it, never had the critical or commercial acclaim of the earlier version.

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The Ice Palace

Jovana — Sat, 10 Jun 2017 17:45:34 +0000

Sally Carrol Happer is a popular 19-year-old girl living in Tarleton, Georgia. She is bored with her life in Tarleton, and, much to the chagrin of her local friends, she becomes engaged to Harry Bellamy, who is from a northern town. She brushes off the concerns of her friends and describes that she needs something “more in her life” and to see “things happen on a big scale”.
Having set the date for their marriage, Sally Carrol decides to travel to the North during the winter, to visit Harry’s hometown and meet his family before the wedding. But the people and winter weather feed a growing disillusion with her decision to move north, leading to an epiphany at the local town’s Ice Palace celebration.

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