Showing results by narrator "Christopher Lane" in All Categories

Celebrated for more than fifty years as a world-renowned novelist, essayist, and political figure and commentator, Gore Vidal is less known for the exquisitely crafted short fiction he wrote as a young man. Like the work of Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, his stories have been overshadowed by the author’s triumphs writing in other genres. Still, Vidal’s short fiction offers us a portrait of the young artist in the 1940s and 1950s. His subtle and comic tales often center on adolescence and homosexual themes.

Stares at the Moon sat, huddled in his blankets, glaring at the small fire that was fighting to warm his makeshift shelter. As he sipped the melted snow, he wondered where the White man and Crying Dove were. Were they warm and dry in some cabin built by the White man—eating food and laughing at him? Just the thought of them together caused his anger to rise once more. This was Stares at the Moon’s 24th winter and as he looked back, he realized the mistakes he had made.

What starts as a pleasant summer on Cape Cod for Doc and Mary Adams turns suddenly chilling. When a house guest is murdered in his bed, with the very pills that control his epilepsy, their son Jack is the prime suspect. After all, Andy had been Jack's rival both at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and for the attention of a beautiful whale watcher named Alice.

Former pro football player and West Texas high school coach Gale McClanahan is plucked out of obscurity to lead the San Antonio Lone Stars. But as he uncovers the true motives of the team's shady owner, McClanahan's once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to coach at football’s highest level turns into a nightmare of treachery and deceit.

How wonderful it is for those who love Christmas to listen to stories that inspire the happiest of seasons. And no story is as compelling as Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, penned in 1843. But what triggered Dickens' imagination to write a story so unlike anything he had written before? In Eben Kruge, author Richard Barlow Adams delivers a pause-resisting narrative that weaves fact and fiction for a penetrating look inside the life and psyche of Dickens when he and wife Catherine traveled to America in 1842 at the invitation of Washington Irving.

When Hugh Conrad picked up that jangling phone in the mud-strewn lobby of a two-bit Bangalore hotel one monsoon-slammed night in June of ’51, the last thing he’d expected to hear was the voice of the father who’d vanished off the face of the earth 24 years prior.

In this series of essays, Roger Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion and an art critic for the London Spectator, examines the current art scene with a scathing intelligence and a crystalline eloquence of writing style. Particularly amusing are his dissections of art-show catalogspeak.

New York, early 1900s: Jimmy Montgomery comes from old New York money and grows up among the Manhattan elite. At the age of 18, Jimmy discovers he's been living a lie. He follows his roots back to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to answer the burning questions in his life. Who is he? What is he? Where does he belong?

When Mary Ariza, a beautiful and savvy lawyer, stops to help a man having a heart attack on the street, she unknowingly marks herself for death. And when police Inspector Jack Kordic, a cop's cop, discovers that the headless, handless corpse floating in the icy Pacific is somehow linked to Mary Ariza, he is thrust into the same nightmare.

Step into the heart-pounding world of The Straits, a thrilling novel set in 1978, where one man's ordinary life is shattered by a ruthless chain of events. Brad Solomon, a bar manager at a remote mountaintop resort, becomes entangled in a deadly game when his daughter is taken hostage by ruthless mercenaries.

For ex-Texas Ranger Sam Bolton, life was good. He had a successful ranch and a beautiful wife, and was content. Until he gets word a dangerous outlaw is coming for him. An outlaw that has built a reputation that rivals any Sam has ever heard of. Now all Sam has worked for has been threatened, forcing Sam to make the toughest decision of his life. Tom Bowdry made his reputation as killer. Lightning Sam Bolton made his years ago as a symbol of justice. When these two meet, bullets will surely fly.

Veloura has never stood a chance. Raised by negligent parents and orphaned as a teen, she's settled for a life of low expectations. She spends her days sprucing up the shack of a has-been bull rider and washing hair down at the local salon. But when it turns out her fiancé doesn't have her best interests at heart, she's forced to come up with a new plan for herself. An opportunity to be the spokesperson for a coffee chain means a bright future could be hers, if only she can stay ahead of her dark past.

For the McWilliams children, life is forever altered the day a terrorist bomb blast rips through the train carrying them across Italy, instantly killing their parents. Dazed and frightened, Charlotte, Oliver, and baby Julia cling to oldest brother Sam, who - only seven at the time - is haunted by every detail.

Thomas Bertram is an American living in San Salvador with his fiancée Cecilia. They own a popular neighborhood restaurant and plan to wed soon. Thomas's dream is to obtain a resident visa for Cecilia and return to the United States.

Two Sisters is Gore Vidal’s fictional memoir of a love affair with a beautiful set of twins in post-war Paris - a story skilfully interwoven with notebooks, diaries and the vivid fragment of a screenplay set in ancient Greece.

It's been two months since Travis' family moved from their shabby old house to a development so new that it seems totally unreal. There's one place, though, where Travis can still connect with his old life: the Salinas library. Travis and his family used to go there together every Saturday, but now he bikes to it alone, re-reading his favorite books. Suddenly, Travis is seeing John Steinbeck's characters spring to life.

Thirty years hasn't changed Las Vegas - the desert just got dirtier. The biggest game in town centers on a massive, deadly roller coaster that winds its way through the Strip's most famous attractions. On the first Saturday of every month, twenty-four desperate passengers get strapped into the notorious ride and gamble with their lives in a twisted game of chance, to the thrill of webcast audiences worldwide. One of them will win, and one will die, but the other twenty-two will escape with nothing but their lives.

Alexanderplatz has long survived as the symbol of a city burdened by its ruinous past. In 2012, twenty-year-old Jonny K. was beaten to death on this infamous Berlin square - and Germany's first multicultural murder brought another shock to a country that’s seen its share. Before the trial, the question of guilt already had an ideological slant: Was Alexanderplatz itself to blame? Was the socialist architecture? The brutality of capitalism?

When the Cutter family's next-door-neighbours, the Langleys, are gunned down in their house one hot August night, the Cutters' world is turned upside down. That violent death should have come so close to them is shocking enough in suburban Promise Falls, but at least the Cutters can console themselves with the thought that lightning is unlikely to strike twice in the same place. Unless, of course, the killers went to the wrong house.

A serial killer is on the loose in Providence, Rhode Island, and he’s killing women who, in life, were anything but angels. Yet when homicide detective Danny Martell arrives on the scene, he finds the victims have been elaborately made up, with fabric wings attached to their lifeless bodies. The papers have dubbed the killings “the Angel Murders” - but it isn’t long before the crime wave drags Danny into his own personal hell.