Showing results by narrator "Michael Garcia" in All Categories

Kevin Canty tells a story based on a real incident that begins with a disastrous fire in an isolated silver-mining town in Idaho in the 1970s. Everyone in town had a friend, lover, brother, or a husband killed in the mine. The Underworld traces the lives of the handful of survivors and their loved ones - a young widow with twin children, a college student trying to make a life for himself in another town, a lifelong hard-rock miner - as they struggle to come to terms with the loss.

It was the biggest leak in history. WikiLeaks infuriated the world's greatest superpower, embarrassed the British royal family and helped cause a revolution in Africa. The man behind it was Julian Assange, one of the strangest figures ever to become a worldwide celebrity. Was he an internet messiah or a cyber-terrorist? Information freedom fighter or sex criminal? The debate would echo around the globe as US politicians called for his assassination.

While many investors fear a rapid rise in inflation, author Gary Shilling, an award-winning economic forecaster, argues that the global economy is going through a long period of deleveraging and weak growth, which makes deflation far more likely and a far greater threat to investors than inflation. Shilling explains with clear language and compelling logic why the world economy will struggle for several more years and what investors can do to protect and grow their wealth in the difficult times ahead.

Joshua Kanagy’s older brother has left the family gift shop business, which is wonderful gute for Aaron, but not for Joshua. Horses are his talent—raising and training them. But how can Joshua step away from the shop when his parents have already had to give up the dream of leaving their legacy to all three of their sons? Enter Joy Yoder, a determined, if sometimes misguided, helper who always manages to drag Joshua into her schemes and promises. Only now her focus turns to finding a solution to his problem, partly to distract from her own.

The New York Times has hailed Joyce Carol Oates as "a dangerous writer in the best sense of the word, one who takes risks almost obsessively with energy and relish." Black Dahlia & White Rose, a collection of 11 previously uncollected stories, showcases the keen rewards of Oates's relentless brio and invention. In one beautifully honed story after another, Oates explores the menace that lurks at the edges of and intrudes upon even the seemingly safest of lives - and maps with rare emotional acuity the transformational cost of such intrusions.

In "The Pit and the Pendulum," one of his most famous short works, a condemned man is judged guilty by the Spanish Inquisition and sentenced to die. Locked away in a pitch-black cell, he soon discovers a pit in the center of the room, a watery grave at its base. Above him hangs a large, razor-sharp pendulum. As the man is slowly tortured, he must face either the pit or the pendulum.

Activists Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove show how prayer and action must go together. Their exposition of key Bible passages provides concrete examples of how a life of prayer fuels social engagement and the work of justice. Phrases like "give us this day our daily bread" and "forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors" take on new meaning when applied to feeding the hungry or advocating for international debt relief.

Pliny is the newly appointed governor of a turbulent and corrupt frontier province seething with hatred of Rome. When a high Roman official is found murdered on a desolate hillside, Pliny must investigate the devotees of a barbarian god whose ranks may include a murderer, an unscrupulous faith healer who knows everyone’s secrets, and a boy who struggles toward manhood though stricken with the "sacred disease." As Pliny pursues one lead after another, he is betrayed where he least expects it.

Former Captain of the Confederate Fleet, Terenze Milos is the hero of the Locusta-Vanga wars, said to have brought the galaxy back from the brink of extinction. Now he lives in obscurity, running a freight operation on the derelict ship Endeavor. When Captain Milos recognizes the unmistakable signs of deadly Locustan technology in a salvaged fighter craft - the Stryker - he sounds a warning. But the Confederacy isn't listening....

A boy's family travels to the Allegheny Mountains in order for the entomologist father to find an undiscovered moth he remembers seeing there in his youth. Over the course of the summer, the boy's sister, who suffers from autism, finds she can speak the language of various insects and creatures of nature, allowing her to understand the world around her for the first time in her life.

The ringed planet and its moons remain the Wild West as the crew delves into the meaning of what makes us human, what is freedom anyway, and exploring these truths - space is hard, relationships are complicated, shit happens, and just as art is subjective, evil is often defined by the eye of the beholder.

Nolan Jackson is a journeyman carpenter by trade and a wanderer by nature. And in 2007, while fellow Americans fight in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Nolan roams, traveling between jobs building tract homes across the West. Following a shocking workplace accident in Las Vegas, he uproots himself from the tentative relationships he has made and heads toward the ocean.

It's 1959. Sixteen-year-old Alex Housman has just stolen his 14th car and frankly doesn't know why. His divorced, working-class father grinds out the night shift at the local Chevy plant in Detroit and looks forward to the flask in his glove compartment and the open bottles of booze in his Flint, Michigan, home. Broke and fighting to survive, Alex and his father face the realities of estrangement, incarceration, and even violence as their lives unfold toward the climactic episode that a New York Times reviewer called "one of the most profoundly powerful in American fiction."

The second Locustan invasion has just begun, and the galaxy is already teetering. Milos is leading the fight but taking heavy losses. Annihilation seems inevitable. The galaxy's hope rests on finding the Fury, an ancient weapon of the legendary Unosi, which, if the legends are to be believed, had once stopped the Locustans. But the path to it has been long forgotten. Ramya Kiroff sets off on a journey to find it, with hopes of delivering a miracle to the galaxy.

Hayley Jo Zimmerman is gone. Taken. And the people of the small town of Twisted Tree must come to terms with this terrible loss and their place in it. In this brilliantly written novel, one girl's story unfolds through the stories of those who knew her.

In the 1960s, strangers to their new city and from the different worlds of New York and Athens, David and Nikos embarked on a life together, a partnership that would endure for 40 years. At a moment of "absolute respect for differences", London offered a freedom in love unattainable in their previous homes. Here is a luminous evocation of a world of writers, poets, artists, and thinkers.

Second Lives takes us on a revelatory journey through the electronic looking glass as Tim Guest investigates one of the most bizarre phenomena of the 21st century: virtual lives.

In Patrick Dacey's stunning debut, we meet longtime neighbors and friends - citizens of working-class Wequaquet - right when the ground beneath their feet has shifted in ways they don't yet understand. Here, after more than a decade of boom and bust, love and pride are closely twinned and dangerously deployed: A lonely woman attacks a memorial to a neighbor's veteran son; a dissatisfied housewife goes overboard with cosmetic surgery on national television.

Jefferson Burke and the Secret of the Lost Scroll is a mystery as old as the Christian church wrapped in a modern-day thriller. Though an unwilling hero, professor Jefferson Burke's intellectual curiosity pits him against the powerful Bruno Krueger in a race to find a 2,000-year-old scroll that calls into question the divinity of Christ and could shake the foundation of Christian faith, upsetting the balance of power in the modern world.

Seven years have passed since Driver ended his campaign against those who double-crossed him. He has left the old life, become Paul West, and founded a successful business. But walking down the street one day, he and his fiancée are attacked by two men, and his fiancée is killed. Sinking back into anonymity, Driver realises that his past stalks him - and will not stop. He has to turn and face it.