Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Short Stories

"The road," Kerouac wrote, "is life," and the women in these three stories hit the road looking for fuller, richer lives than the ones they have at home. One flies to Ireland to land a husband; one, who hoped to find shelter in paradise, realizes her journey isn't over; and one loses a lover, a friend, and a few precious illusions about herself as she drives across America.

"Secrets", set in the '60s, is the gripping story of a teenage girl whose illusions about her best friend's family are blasted along with her faith in Kennedy's Camelot. "A Sympathetic Listener" is the hilarious and heartbreaking story of a 24-year-old woman with cancer who, on her healing odyssey, finds connection and support from a most surprising source. In "Great-aunt Mariah and the Gigolo", a 70-something widow rocks the family when she brings home her young beau.

The Rileys, of Bar Harbor, Maine, negotiate the changes in their family as they head to Ford's Theatre, in Washington, DC, for their son's violin performance. Sweet, comic, and exuberant, the novella also tells the story of a transgendered adolescent as she comes to terms with her family, world, and sexuality.

When we meet Shalem, a young woman in her late 30s, she is enduring small talk at a cocktail party hosted by one of her husband's colleagues. One talks about her breast milk and her twins; another frets about the matronly ass of his girlfriend. Shalem has arrived at the age of no longer young but not old and balancing the in-between. What she wears isn't cool. What she thinks isn't cool.

Finally available after three decades, a lost classic of the Harlem Renaissance that Langston Hughes acclaimed for its "hard poetic beauty". Eric Walrond (1898 - 1966), in his only book, injected a profound Caribbean sensibility into black literature. His work was closest to that of Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston with its striking use of dialect and its insights into the daily lives of the people around him.

Noreen McAuliffe's Come Down in the World, a story about a nineteenth-century logging camp, wears a style so seamless and perfectly matched it feels tailor-made. From the first few lines to the quietly explosive finale, the listener is surrounded with instant authenticity that transports us to a time, place, and situation with stakes so high that most of us need a daring writer to imagine them for us.

Revenge is one of the great themes in literature, from Shakespeare to Poe. This collection contains 18 original stories commissioned for this volume plus a reprint of a classic Ruth Rendell mystery.

Die dritte Sammlung voll unheimlicher und fantastischer Erzählungen von Edgar Allan Poe in ungekürzter Fassung, erzählt von Erich Räuker.

Eine Sammlung voll unheimlicher und fantastischer Erzählungen von Edgar Allan Poe in ungekürzter Fassung, erzählt von Erich Räuker.

Darkness Prevails is a collection of 15 terrifying tales by author Cliff R. Barlow. From twisted yarns about the demons of hell to gut-wrenching stories about the unrelenting demons within, this collection pulls no punches. You have been warned. This is not for the faint of heart.

In Lonesome Rider, born to a Sioux mother and a white father, Blade McKenna grew up between two opposing worlds, never wholly belonging to either. The Civil War brought him yet more sorrow and loss. Now Blade is a man who lives only for revenge. This violent, merciless wilderness is no place for beautiful Easterner Jessica Dylan, who is on her own mission to clear her late husband's name.

Traplines is extraordinary fiction that presents the menacing underside of family life. In crackling prose, Eden Robinson describes homes ruled by bullies, psychopaths, and delinquents; families whose conflict resolution techniques range from grand theft to homicide; and kids who just can't get a break.

"Kalopsia", a word meaning "the delusion of things being more beautiful than they actually are", is what happens to us when we think we've fallen in love. Almost-love Stories is a collection of four short stories that almost ended well. Love isn't the way romance novels make it seem. Happily ever after doesn't exist and love is blind, but perhaps we should open our eyes.

I Dig Symmetry is a collection of character-driven stories of love, obsession, and lust, chronicling the absurdities of men (as in males) in their selfish drive to love and be loved, to own and be owned, to fantasize but never face the reality of their objectifying, damaging methods. Nothing is real, nothing is forbidden, and everyone's a head case.

These interconnected stories are set in an opulent quasi-historical world of magick and high manners called the Republic of Califa. The Republic is a strangely familiar place - a baroque approximation of Gold Rush era-California with an overlay of Aztec ceremony - yet the characters who populate it are true originals: rockstar magicians, murderous gloves, bouncing boy terrors, blue tinted butlers, sentient squids, and a three-year-old Little Tiny Doom and her vengeful pink plush pig.

Is the black man who sends his children to a very white private school "a sell out"? Is the black man with a good job and a white wife, a "race betrayer"? The nameless black narrator has done all the above, dragging himself from an impoverished urban ghetto to an upper middle-class life. He has done everything to assimilate into polite white English society, playing strictly by "their rules". As he attends a polo match with "society's finest"; his mask is slipping; cracks are beginning to appear in his apparently perfect life.

Tales of the Out & the Gone reflects the astounding evolution of America's most provocative literary anti-hero. The first section of the audiobook, War Stories, offers six stories enmeshed in the vola-tile politics of the 1970s and 1980s. The second section, Tales of the Out & the Gone, reveals Amiri Baraka's increasing literary adventurousness, combining an unpredictable language play with a passion for abstraction and psychological exploration.

Eleven writers largely unknown outside Cuba depict a world that veers from a hyper-real Havana in decay, against a backdrop of oblivious drug-toting German tourists, to a fantasy land (or is it?) where vigilant Cubans bar the door to zombies masquerading as health inspectors. Sex and knife-fights, stutterers and addicts, losers and lost literary classics: welcome to a raw and genuine island universe closed to casual visitors.

Jacob DeWitt, a widower on Christmas leave during the Civil War, returns to his New York home determined to get Ellie Winifred to marry him. She has taken in his two motherless children and his younger brother while he is off at war. It makes perfect sense to him that they marry, but Ellie resists. It will take every bit of help Jacob, a proud, stubborn man, can get if he is going to convince Ellie that he is worthy of her love.

"Boredom is dangerous," writes Benjamin Samuel, Co-Editor of Electric Literature, in his introduction to this issue of Recommended Reading. "It can make us lazy, complacent, and if we suffer too much of it we're liable to become boring ourselves. For the whalers at sea in Anu Jindal's Not a Bad Bunch, boredom is far more insidious; according to the ship's surgeon, who narrates the story, it's an early symptom of an infectious and barbarous madness.