Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Anthologies & Short Stories

In the wake of San Francisco Noir, Los Angeles Noir, and Orange County Noir - all popular volumes in the Akashic Noir Series - comes the latest California installment, Oakland Noir. Masterfully curated by Jerry Thompson and Eddie Muller, the "Czar of Noir", this volume will shock, titillate, provoke, and entertain. The diverse cast of talented contributors will not disappoint.

Released one year after the publication of The King in Yellow - a milestone of supernaturalfiction - Robert W. Chambers’ title story of this short-story collection isconsidered one of his finest weird tales. It is followed by a series ofromantic art nouveau stories. Chambers’ love of natural scenery, symbolicanimal figures, and ghostly imagery are on full display as he weaves hischaracters through these otherworldly tales.

Imagine… Ghosts, gods, and devils - heavens and hells - cities in the sky and cities beneath the sea. Time machines, spaceships - certainly you can imagine Martians, but what about interplanetary vampires? Or a mouse that isn't a mouse? Honeymoon in Hell proves that Fredric Brown has a special vision, a sight beyond our wildest nightmares, a perception of things we couldn't even begin to imagine.

In this short story by the masterful Tobias Wolff, a teenage boy learns the joys - and struggles - of adult life.

Eager for independence and adult-like freedom, a teenage boy takes a summer job baling hay on a rural farm. Savoring the farm wife’s attention and the extra change in his pocket, the boy feels like a grown man. The fellow hands give him a sense of camaraderie - Clemson, a fastidious boy who attends the same high school; Eduardo, a talkative Mexican seasonal worker; and Miguel, a quiet man and Eduardo’s brother.

With his marriage on the rocks, a father takes his son skiing for the weekend. After insisting on staying just a bit longer - despite a growing blizzard - the boy's father finds they're snowed in at the resort, the road blockaded by state troopers. To what lengths will he go to keep his marriage intact?

Author of more than 30 books of poetry and prose, Donald Hall performs dozens of his best-loved poems, together with excerpts from 6 of his works of prose. Bursting with the passion of living, yet reverent of time and place, Hall's evocative style has made him one of America's foremost poets. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert Frost Medal of the Poetry Society of America, and the New England Book Award for nonfiction, and former Poet Laureate of New Hampshire, he gives each listener this gift of words - words painstakingly entwined with energy and love. Donald Hall: Prose and Poetry is a tour de force, an intimate convergence of poet, author, and listener.

O. Henry wove several stories together into this highly episodic narrative, taking his title and inspiration from Lewis Carroll's ballad of the walrus and the carpenter in Through the Looking-Glass. The stories are set in the fictional country of Anchuria in Central America, a banana republic where larceny is rampant and revolution lurking in every impoverished back alley. O. Henry offers a cutting satire of contemporary politics and prejudices.

The world-class writers featured in this collection are adept at conjuring the depth of passion that surrounds all stories of love and loss. The short story form is perfect for capturing the uplift and dizzying heights that accompany a new object of affection, as well as the queasy unease and bottomless longing of lost loves.

The "man of property", Soames Forsyte, has mellowed with the passing of the years until, in his old age, he is a patient and benign figure, guarding with especial tenderness the welfare of his daughter, Fleur. But all his watchfulness and devotion are powerless to avert tragedy when Fleur revives her old love affair with Jon Forsyte on Jon's return to England with his American wife.

Here are four short stories from Zane Grey, the acclaimed author of Western adventures and frontier characters. Living in the ruthless solitude of the desert, range, or mountains, the men in these four stories are all on personal journeys. In "The Camp Robber", a man has driven his wife away and yearns for reconciliation. "Amber's Mirage" reveals an old man's realization of the corrupting power of gold when up against young love.

Four tales of love and adventure in the Old West introduce a cast of characters that includes a brave Texas ranger who risks his life against avenging outlaws to rescue the woman he secretly loves; a beautiful seductress who comes between two brothers; a desperate fugitive who seeks sanctuary with a peace-loving people; and a daring young schoolteacher who journeys West to meet the man who has captured her heart. Included are "The Ranger", "Canyon Walls", "Avalanche", and "From Missouri".

Protozoa is a word from biology via the Greek, meaning "first animals". These short stories were indeed among the first life spontaneously generated in Lois McMaster Bujold's nascent writing career. Along with an introduction by the author, this collection features the short stories "Barter", "Garage Sale", "The Hole Truth", "Dreamweaver's Dilemma", and "Aftermaths".

When this groundbreaking serialized dramatization premiered on 320 U.S. radio stations, critics were unanimous in their praise. It won numerous honors including the George Foster Peabody Award and the Pulitzer Prize for broadcasting. Never before or since has such an ambitious undertaking been attempted in public radio, and it was accomplished, not by a major network, but by a small nonprofit independent producer in Chicago. That was in 1981. It has been sitting on the shelf ever since.

This audiobook introduces Brown Dog, an ex-Bible student with raucously asocial tendencies who rescues the preserved body of an Indian chief from the depths of Lake Superior in a caper that nets a wildly unexpected bounty. Elsewhere, a band of 60s radicals reunite to free an old comrade from a Mexican jail. And a 50-year-old suburban housewife flees quietly from her abusive businessman husband and explores the bittersweet pageant of the preceding years within the sanctuary of an Iowa cornfield.

Feel the breath-taking tingle of suspense. Share the captivating horror of the supernatural in these six complete stories presented by a masterful reader.

"Firelight" tells the story of a mother and her son who are spending the afternoon viewing apartments on a chilly day in Seattle, Washington. The two have no intention of renting one - they can only afford to live in a meager boarding house. Nevertheless, they spend every Saturday wandering through apartments and department stores, dreaming of a different life.

Culling the vastness of experience--from its bizarre fringes and breathtaking pinnacles to the mediocre and desperately below average--like an expert curator, Jim Shepard populates this collection with characters at once wildly diverse and wholly fascinating. A "black world" operative can't tell his wife a word about his daily activities, but doesn't resist sharing her confidences. A young Alpine researcher is smitten by the girlfriend of his dead brother, killed in an avalanche he believes he caused.

The Lurking Fear includes examples of Lovecraft's earliest weird fiction including "Hypnos", "What the Moon Brings", "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs", and "Memory" (inspiration for the 2014 film of the same name), as well as the title story, "The Lurking Fear", a traditional horror study commissioned by George Julian Houtain to be run as a serial in Home Brew magazine in 1923 that has served as the source material for multiple films and been adapted into a comic book.

Fantasy icon Jane Yolen is adored by generations of readers and listeners of all ages. Now she triumphantly returns with this inspired gathering of fractured fairy tales and legends. Yolen breaks open the classics to reveal their crystalline secrets: a philosophical bridge that misses its troll, a spinner of straw as a falsely accused moneylender, the villainous wolf adjusting poorly to retirement. Each of these offerings features a new author note and original poem, illuminating tales that are old, new, and brilliantly refined.

A surreal love letter to this private side of the Met, Metropolitan Stories unfolds in a series of amusing and poignant vignettes in which we discover larger-than-life characters, the downside of survival, and the powerful voices of the art itself. The result is a novel bursting with magic, humor, and energetic detail, but also a beautiful book about introspection, an ode to lives lived for art, ultimately building a powerful collage of human experience and the world of the imagination.