Showing results by narrator "Gary Tiedemann" in All Categories

The pandemic was rough on everyone, especially since school went from being a fun place where you could hang out with your friends to a bunch of heads in small rectangles all trying to talk at once. For Bradley, Edelle, Hunter, Jasper, and Keiko, that’s about to change. A mysterious box arrives at each of their houses, and they’re invited to attend a virtual school. More than just being online, they’ll be able to create an avatar of themselves and interact with their friends and other classmates in real time using VR headsets.

One battle. One man. One mission. The insurgents are dug in and ready for war. To them, it's about guns, guts, and glory. For Jack Bunker, freedom and the flag are paramount. He's prepared to fight, despite their overwhelming firepower. As the final confrontation nears, Bunker knows death comes with it.

Alex is a baseball player. A great one. His papi is pushing him to go pro, but Alex maybe wants to be a poet. Not that Papi would understand or allow that. Isa is a dancer. She'd love to go pro, if only her Havana-born mom weren't dead set against it...just like she's dead set against her daughter falling for a Latino. And Isa's privileged private-school life - with her dad losing his job and her older brother struggling with mental illness - is falling apart. Not that she'd ever tell that to Alex. Fate - and the New York City subway - bring Alex and Isa together.

Welcome to Angel Hill, Missouri, a town that shot blood from the ground at its own groundbreaking. There are only two roads in or out of town, and everything within those borders is subject to the whims of reality. Those who grew up here are immune to the town's peculiarities. But Jack and Liz have just moved here, and for their young son, Joey, it's almost like coming home again.

In this refreshing collection, one of our best writers on desert places, Gary Paul Nabhan, challenges traditional notions of the desert. Beautiful, reflective, and at times humorous, Nabhan's extended essay also called "The Nature of Desert Nature" reveals the complexity of what a desert is and can be. He passionately writes about what it is like to visit a desert and what living in a desert looks like when viewed through a new frame, turning age-old notions of the desert on their heads.

Don't look out towards Knob Island at night. That was the warning Douglas' grandfather gave him as a boy. Now returning to the shores of Lake Manuxet as a grown man, with his twin sister and their ailing grandmother in tow for a final, nostalgic visit, Douglas begins to experience frightful things in his cherished childhood vacation spot. Just what is it that claws its way out of the lake each night, only to approach their cabin? What mysteries does the remote lake hold? Find out.

Fact: There's a real-life parasite that rewires mammal brains for extreme aggressive behavior. Over half of all the world's mammals are already infected, but aren't symptomatic because the parasite remains dormant in most hosts. Like a ticking bomb, this puppet master is patiently waiting for the right time to set off its hosts against the world. That time is now! There will be no peace or tranquility on Ted and TJ's transatlantic cruise as something is very wrong: animals have started to attack for no apparent reason.

Four teenage boys are high school seniors at two very different schools within the city of Los Angeles, the second largest school district in the nation with nearly 700,000 students. In this “exceptional work of investigative journalism…laced with compassion, insight, and humor” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) Jeff Hobbs stunningly captures the challenges and triumphs of being a young person confronting the future — both their own and the cultures in which they live — in contemporary America.

De Quincey, Baudelaire, Poe, Joyce, Benjamin, Melville, Lorca, Whitman...walkers and city dwellers all, collagists and chroniclers, picking the detritus of their eras off the filthy streets and assembling it into something new, shocking, and beautiful. In To Walk Alone in the Crowd, Antonio Muñoz Molina emulates these classic inspirations, following their peregrinations and telling their stories in a book that is part memoir, part novel, part chronicle of urban wandering.

Inspired by a terrifying true story, acclaimed author Guadalupe Garcia McCall creates a twisty tale about a boy desperately trying to survive in a new town with a secret past. James always knew moving from Texas to Oregon was going to be horrible.. But no sooner have he and his family arrived in their "perfect" new home in their "perfect" new town than he starts getting mysterious letters from someone called the Keeper. Someone who claims to be watching him. Someone who is looking for “young blood.”

Physicist Lucas Ramsay travels back in time to correct mistakes that have cost billions of lives, but runs into a new problem when his incursion pulls in hundreds of copies of himself from parallel universes. Now his planned reversion is infinitely more complex as he’s forced to do battle with evil versions of himself, some of whom want to craft a timeline more beneficial to their universe, but horrific to all the others, including Earth’s.

December 13, 1920. It was a typical Monday morning when three US Navy officials boarded a hot-air balloon for an easy, routine training flight. But as evening came, heavy rain and wind knocked Lieutenants Louis Kloor, Stephen Farrell, and Walter Hinton off course, eventually forcing a crash landing deep within the snowy Canadian wilderness. As the men searched for salvation, they were overcome by freezing temperatures, starvation, and fatigue. To survive this harrowing experience, the brave military officers would have to go up against their greatest enemies yet.

When his wife, Angel, is killed in a head-on collision, Gomez Gomez feels he can't go on - so he doesn't. He spends his days in the bushes next to the crash site drinking Thunderbird wine and his nights cradling a coffee can full of Angel's ashes. Slow, sure suicide, with no one for company but the snakes, Elvis' ghost, and a strange kid named Bones. Across town, Father Jake Morales plays it safe, haunted by memories of the woman he left behind, hiding his guilt, loss, and love behind a thick wall of cassock and ritual.

The Stuart family moves to a marginal neighborhood of Cienfuegos, a city on the southern coast of Cuba. Arturo Stuart, a charismatic, visionary preacher, discovers soon after arriving that God has given him a mission: to build a temple that surpasses any before seen in Cuba, and to make of Cienfuegos a new Jerusalem. In a neighborhood that roils with passions and conflicts, at the foot of a cathedral that rises higher day by day, there grows a generation marked by violence, cruelty, and extreme selfishness.

Former special ops and survivalist Simon Redfall has lost everything: his wife, his fortune, and his future. Despite being hunted by angry mobs and his own bankrupt government, Simon arrives in Washington, DC, to attend the first ever pay-per-view execution of someone he loves. Then red storm clouds appear and begin to spread their potentially toxic rain across the planet. The mysterious weather phenomenon grounds all travelers, knocks out communications, and threatens to take down the grid, sending civilization back to the Stone Age.

Jake Hayes is missing. This much is certain. At first, his wife Nina thinks he is blowing off steam somewhere after their heated fight the night before. But then a day goes by. Two days. Five. And Jake is still nowhere to be found. Nina’s friend Lily thinks she may have been the last to see Jake before he went missing. After Lily confesses everything to her husband, Christian, the two decide that nobody can find out what happened leading up to Jake’s disappearance, especially not Nina. But Nina is out there looking for Jake, and she won’t stop until the truth is discovered.

Caught between the Mob and the feds in a plot to save the casinos in Havana from Castro's revolution, Wolfe Rabin pulls the biggest money-laundering scheme in history, but his hubris leads to the conspiracy unraveling in a sensational trial. At a time when there was a jukebox in every restaurant, diner, bar, barracks, arcade, and canteen, Rabin's trajectory from inventor to promoter to outlaw is set against the Mob's growing infiltration of the jukebox industry.

Partying with popular classmates they barely know is not what Eva and her BFFs had in mind for their spring break. But things have been off ever since Miles' academic career took a turn for the worse (they don't talk about it), so a trip to a private beach lodge might be exactly what they need. And Eva won’t admit it, but the chance to reconnect with Colton is worth putting up with Piper’s constant livestreams to her thousands of “besties.”

King Sparda Kalnoroc is no mortal to be shaken by the likes of one rogue Excalibur Knight. He may not even be mortal at all, if the rumors are to be trusted. When Nate Arturi returns home to find an Earth inexorably changed by the swelling tides of galactic war, he quickly sets course to rid the planet of the pointless buearocracy and fearmongering that seem to have choked it to the point of death. But some problems are not so easily solved. Some enemies cannot be bought or broken.

The mansion looms above the Hudson River, just outside the town of Watch Point, New York. Converted into a school for boys, its evil has remained dormant for many years. But when a boy named Jim Hook enters Harrow Academy, all hell breaks loose - and his worst nightmare may just come true.