Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Literature & Fiction

New York City, 1968: The customers at Café Marie don’t come just for the excellent coffee and pastries. They come for the sophisticated ambiance, and the illusion of being somewhere other than a bustling, exhausting city. Headwaiter Charles Ward helps create that illusion through impeccable service—unobtrusive, nearly invisible, yet always watchful.

A landmark collection of poetry by acclaimed fiction writer, translator, and MacArthur Fellow John Keene, Punks: New Selected Poems is a generous treasury in seven sections that spans decades and includes previously unpublished and brand new work. With depth and breadth, Punks weaves together historic narratives of loss, lust, and love.

As students at university of Makhanda, South Africa during the #RUReferenceList campaign, Langa and her lover Khwezi have a passionate and complex relationship. Puzzling gaps in her memory haunt Langa, yet her dreams are vivid with colors and symbols that hint at a nightmare of forgotten violations and losses. So many secrets—and Langa has had enough of secrets and silences. Who can she turn to? Her mother? Her grandmother? Khwezi? Or herself?

Yes, Raheim "Pooquie" Rivers and Mitchell "Little Bit" Crawford are back—they've got a serious love thang goin' on, and IT'S ALL JOOD. But for Raheim, it's a trip that promises to be both phat and frightening. As he struggles with being in love with another man for the first time, he must also come to terms with the murder of his homeboy, Derrick "D.C." Carter, and confront his father, who returns after abandoning him and his mother over sixteen years ago. Add his ever-curious five-year-old son, Junior, to the mix, and it's no wonder Raheim doesn't go mad crazy.

In the third title in the bestselling B-Boy Blues series, Mitchell Crawford attends his tenth anniversary high school reunion and comes face-to-face with the man who stole his virginity and broke his heart: gymnastics coach Warren Reid. Will Mitchell finally have his say and exact his revenge—or will he fall for Warren's charms and be the same fool twice, if only for one nite?

March 1995. As Raheim “Pooquie” Rivers juggles his increasingly hectic schedule as a supermodel, he is rocked by the news that one of his idols, NWA founder Eric “Eazy-E” Wright, has AIDS. His complacency shattered, Raheim gets tested for HIV but keeps it a secret from his boyfriend, Mitchell “Little Bit” Crawford. Meanwhile, life goes on: his son struggles in a new school and his high school sweetheart falls in love with a new man, while Mitchell becomes concerned about his moodiness and withdrawal.

Since being cast as an interviewee for the documentary Beneath My Skin, Cassandra “Sand” Ross is inspired to walk in her own truth. While undergoing her gender transition, she decides to produce the unscripted reality series Versions of Love with the help of her wife, Rene. It is sure to be a journey, as the couple embeds themselves in the vibrant light of the culture and the love stories between women. When Rene hires a production assistant, Sand is once again faced with a blast from the past - an old flame, who has every intention of winning Sand’s heart back.

In Tamil Nadu, India, a boy is born with blue skin. His father sets up an ashram, and the family makes a living off of the pilgrims who seek the child’s blessings and miracles, believing young Kalki to be the 10th human incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. In Kalki’s 10thyear, he is confronted with three trials that will test his power and prove his divine status and, his father tells him, spread his fame worldwide. While he seems to pass them, Kalki begins to question his divinity.

Carlton Monroe is finally getting his groove back. After a year playing dad to his nephew and sending him safely off to college, it’s back to his bachelor ways. But when his teenaged niece shows up on his doorstep looking for a permanent home, his plan comes to a screeching halt. Family is everything, and in the eyes of social services, a couple makes a better adoptive family than an overworked bachelor father. A fake relationship with his closest friend is the best way to keep his family together.

Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful - the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.

Jonathan Lewis-Adey was nine when his parents separated, and his mother, Sid, vanished entirely from his life. It is not until he is a grown man that Jonathan finally reconnects with his beloved lost parent, only to find, to his shock and dismay, that the woman he knew as "Sid" in Toronto has become an elegant man named Sydney living in his native Trinidad.

This raw and passionate novel from national best-selling author Tracy Price-Thompson is a provocative story of love across racial boundaries. Juanita and her best friend Scooter are both frustrated in life and love, Juanita because her light skin makes it tough to fit in, and Scooter because he is gay. When they meet two fine-looking Puerto Rican men, their lives head down paths they never anticipated.

From syndicated humor columnist Marc Acito comes a wildly inventive and hysterically funny novel that is equal parts Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Fame, Risky Business, Dead Poets Society, and The Catcher in the Rye.

No one can debate the fact that Zane knows sex. The queen of erotic fiction has hit home run after home run in the literary arena with her literary offerings. Now comes the latest, a collection of lesbian erotica that will have listeners squirming on the edge of their seats, curling up beneath the sheets, and fantasizing about the possibilities.

Take an unhappy husband with a spoiled and suspicious wife, an androgynous businesswoman with a knack for inflicting pain, an executive assistant with no shame, then add a passive-aggressive lesbian pillow princess to the scene and you have just started the war between tops and bottoms.

These five salacious stories are filled to the brim with sizzling, steamy encounters for anyone who enjoys, fantasizes about, or simply craves girl-girl sex.

Savedra Severos is no stranger to intrigue. Mistress to the King of Selafai and daughter of a rival noble house, she navigates the treacheries of court with every breath. On the eve of delicate peace talks, the court mage is found murdered. As Savedra investigates, she stumbles further into a web of secrets that enmeshes three kingdoms - entangling spies and sorcerers, lovers and enemies, strangers and kin. Among those secrets are Savedra's own, dangerous enough to destroy her king and her family if they come to light.

As a star basketball player in her last year of high school, Nancy Takahiro's life is about to change forever. Facing the fear of leaving home and wondering where her skill will take her, Nancy is not prepared for the complications that arise when she meets Raina Webber, a devoted, ferocious athlete, whose love of basketball is matched only by her talent for it.

Two years after his partner, Francesco, died, 28-year-old Kevin Doyle is dusting off his one good suit jacket for yet another funeral, yet another loss in their close-knit group. They had all been young, beautiful, and living the best days of their lives, though they didn't know it. That was before New York City began to feel like a war zone, its horrors somehow invisible, and ignored by the rest of the world. Some people might insist that Francesco is in a better place now, but Kevin definitely isn't.

Subverting celebrated classics of poetry and mythology and examining horrors from contemporary film and cultural fact, National Book Award-winner Justin Phillip Reed engages darkness as an aesthetic to conjure the revenant animus that lurks beneath the exploited civilities of marginalized people. In these poems, Reed finds agency in the other-than-human identities assigned to those assaulted by savageries of the state. In doing so, he summons a retaliatory, counterviolent black spirit to revolt and to inhabit the revolting.