Showing results by narrator "Bronson Pinchot" in All Categories

Funny Business is based around the theme of - what else - humor, and if you’re familiar with Jon and Guys Read, you already know what you’re in store for: an hilarious story.

In The Ape's Wife and Other Stories - Kiernan's 12th collection of short fiction since 2001 - she displays the impressive range that characterizes her work. With her usual disregard for genre boundaries, she masterfully navigates the territories that have traditionally been labeled dark fantasy, sword and sorcery, science fiction, steampunk, and neo-noir.

Evan Michaels struggles with being different, with having the complete memories of two other people who lived sequentially before him. He fights loneliness and believes his ‘condition’ is unique, until he meets Poppy. She recognises his struggle because she has the same ‘condition’, except that she is much older, remembering back seven consecutive lives. But there is something else she must share with Evan - she is a member of a secret society of others like them. They are, in effect, near immortals.

Scott O'Connor's novels have been hailed as "astonishing" (Library Journal), and "so insistently stirring, you want to lean in close to catch every word" (New York Times Book Review). Now, from the author of Untouchable and Half World comes A Perfect Universe, a piercingly emotional cycle of stories in the tradition of Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad and Annie Proulx's Close Range. Welcome to the often-overlooked corners of sun-bleached Los Angeles, where a teenaged bicycle thief searches for a kidnapped boy, a young musician emerges as the lone survivor of a building collapse, and an aging actor faces the erasure of his past.

Timi, a boy in Uzbekistan, navigates a strange world of camel breeding, half-understood Islamic doctrine, Mexican soap operas dubbed into Uzbek, and the legacy of widespread pollution from the Soviet era, all while dreaming of doing death-defying stunts on his rickety motorcycle. Lonely and accident-prone, Timi befriends an American humanitarian worker in a struggling marriage, tries to avoid his father's frequent rages, and plans out the astonishing motorcycle jump that will give meaning to his life.

Their ambitious TV-movie needs to be made fast and cheap, but a brutal murder grinds production to a halt. An approaching forest fire forces everyone to evacuate. In the confusion not everyone gets out. Eddie is the alcoholic director, Sheila the vulnerable camera assistant, Tom the self-centered actor, and Sondra the spurned sheriff's deputy. Death comes sudden and silent. The camouflaged killer's weapon of choice is a high-tech hunting bow. The mysterious assassin has an agenda.

Jonathan Blake makes a living stealing antiquities – stealing them back, that is. A field agent for the Argo Foundation, a company that makes it their business to preserve humanity's history by liberating stolen artifacts from thieves and looters, Blake is used to dangerous assignments. But when he is forced by the US government into a deadly mission involving a missing Napoleonic standard, he finds himself in over his head.

Funny Business is based around the theme of - what else - humor, and if you’re familiar with Jon and Guys Read, you already know what you’re in store for: an hilarious story.

On a small island in a glacier-fed lake on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, Gary and Irene’s marriage is unraveling. Alone now that the children are grown, Gary, driven by 30 years of diverted plans, is determined to build from scratch the cabin he has always wanted, believing it will recapture what once drew him to Alaska. Irene knows better. She suspects that the cabin is Gary’s first step to leaving her.

At the turn of the 20th century, as the oppression of Russia's imperial rule takes its toll on Finland, the three Koski siblings - Ilmari, Matti and the politicized young Aino - are forced to flee. They settle among a community of Finns in Deep River - a town on the western edges of the United States. The brothers face the excitement and danger of pioneering this frontier wilderness. But while they are climbing and felling trees 100 metres high, Aino is organising the country's fledgling labour movements.

Bennett "Benito" Lang is a young scientist who seeks solace in the precise and irrefutable laws of physics, only to find he cannot escape his own humanity. But he is about to discover love, betrayal, and a whole spectrum of mortal phenomena. Soon, he will be forced to face the unpredictable everyday reality he evades - and to learn from it.

Los Angeles, California — Whitey Roode, a likeable former LAPD gold shield turned private investigator is on another case. Father Nicholas Aloysius Quinn, an activist priest and minor celebrity who uses film as his medium, has his most recent premier ruined by a suicide at the red-carpet event.

These five classic mysteries offer chilling darkness, drama, and intrigue. Includes: "Murders in the Rue Morgue" by Edgar Allan Poe; "Silver Blaze" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; "The Secret of the Growing Gold" by Bram Stoker; "The Honour of Israel Gow" by G. K. Chesterton; and "The Signal-Man" by Charles Dickens.

There’s nothing better than taking your timid little cousin Thad to one of those sweet haunted houses the 4-H Club decorates for Halloween. Except, of course, if the house turns out to actually be haunted. A short story from Guys Read: Thriller, edited by Jon Scieszka.

Vienna, 1939. Professor Speckstein's dog has been brutally killed, and he wants to know why. But these are uncharitable times, and one must be careful where one probes. When an unexpected house call leads Dr. Beer to Speckstein's apartment, he finds himself in the bedroom of Zuzka, the professor's niece. Wide-eyed, flirtatious, and not detectably ill, Zuzka leads the young doctor to her window and opens up a view of their apartment block that Beer has never known. Across the shared courtyard there is nine-year-old Anneliese, the lonely daughter of an alcoholic.

In The Player, the Hollywood classic that was adapted into the celebrated movie by Robert Altman, film executive Griffin Mill got away with murder. Now Mill is back, down to his last $6 million, and broke. His second wife wants to leave him. His first wife still loves him. His children hate him, and, believing that the end of the world is happening, he wants to save them all with one last desperate plan to save his life: quit the studio and convince an almost billionaire that he has the road map and the mettle to make them both achieve savage wealth.

It is the autumn of 1999. A year has passed since Lucy Darby’s unexpected death, leaving her husband David and son Whitley to mend the gaping hole in their lives. David, a trauma-site cleanup technician, spends his nights expunging the grisly remains of strangers, helping their families move on, though he is unable to do the same. Whitley—an eleven-year-old social pariah known simply as the Kid—hasn’t spoken since his mother’s death.

Writers & Lovers established Lily King as one of our most beloved authors of contemporary fiction. Now, for the first time ever, King collects 10 of her finest short stories, opening fresh realms of discovery for avid and new listeners alike.

This wildly entertaining account of the golden age of the action movie charts Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s carnage-packed journey from enmity to friendship against the backdrop of Reagan’s America and the Cold War. Revealing fascinating untold stories of the colourful characters who ascended in their wake, it tells the story of how the era of the invincible action hero who used muscle, martial arts or the perfect weapon to save the day began to fade.

The year is 1973, and Alan Eastman, a public intellectual, accidental cultural critic, washed-up war journalist, husband, and philanderer finds himself alone on the floor of his study in an existential crisis. His wife has taken their kids and left him to live with her mother in New Jersey, and his best work feels as though it is years behind him. In the depths of despair, he receives an unexpected and unwelcome phone call from his old rival, offering him the chance to go to Vietnam to write the definitive account of the end of America's longest war.