Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Short Stories

Edward Swift's latest work, is this novel recounting of the remarkable life of Miss Spellbinder - the love child of adventurer Lord Andrew Spellbinder and the tempestuous Spanish coloratura, Amelita de la Luna. Miss Spellbinder shares her voyeuristic adventures and remarkable journey. This audiobook is unlike anything you have ever heard before.

Charlie Caine has been to too many Hollywood funerals. The studio system is long gone, and its stars - some forgotten, some preserved for display on a late-night show - are beginning to pass on, as well. Only a few turn out for the final performance of Babe Austrian, a peroxide-blond beauty whose red hot talkies changed the way America thought about sex. As he gazes into her coffin, Caine remembers Babe as she was: a dynamite beauty with secrets that could have burned Hollywood to the ground.

Fedora is dead, and movies will never be the same. A star since the early days of Hollywood, she survived the business for an unprecedented four decades before retiring to Crete. As the years wore on and her costars turned wrinkled and worn, Fedora's perfect features never faded. Now that she has finally passed, the secret to her longevity will be told - a shocking revelation that will raise her to the level of myth.

Terry and Mike are cousins whose families are almost seamlessly intertwined. Raised as close as brothers and living happy childhoods, neither one thinks of what can go wrong. But the unexpected deaths of both their fathers catapult their lives in two very different directions. Terry finds trouble with the law, while Mike lives his life racked with guilt and sadness.

In the title novella, a third-rate American playwright named Landau attends a literary conference in Prague, where an organized group excursion to a former concentration camp degenerates into a battle of wills and an exercise in egomania and public humiliation. Nina, the heroine of the second novella, "Three Pigs in Five Days," is sent to Paris to write an article for her lover's travel journal - a dizzying, erotic pilgrimage that forces her to see how sex has distorted her view of the world.

Big bugs, cloned cats, and feral star-children play leading roles in the seven stories that make up Fast’s unconventional and thought-provoking collection. The Edge of Tomorrow is a significant foray into science fiction by one of the 20th century’s most prolific novelists. In looking beyond our universe, Fast reveals much about the America of his time - where the Cold War and a nascent civil rights movement stoked unconscious fears and desires.

In the Hugo Award nominee Forty, Counting Down, computer genius Justin Kloster travels to the past to stop himself from making a terrible mistake. But all actions have their consequences. Then, in Twenty-One, Counting Up, Kloster's college life and romantic dreams are rudely interrupted when the 40-year-old Justin arrives from the future to save him from himself.

Madison Smartt Bell’s celebrated debut story collection about the daily struggles of life in America. Engrossing and brimming with insight, Bell’s early stories are remarkable for their ambition of scope and the author’s deft rendering of human diversity.

Nearly forty years after the publication of his first story, "The Wrath of Purple," in the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, Howard Fast returned to the genre with a set of nine supremely entertaining tales. In this collection, a Vietnam general shoots down what appears to be an angel, a man sells his soul to the devil for a copy of the next day's Wall Street Journal, and a group of alien beings bestow a mouse with human thought and emotion.

Quiet As They Come is a beautiful and at times brutal portrait of a people caught between two cultures. Set in San Francisco from the 1980s to the present day, this debut collection explores the lives of several families of Vietnamese immigrants as they struggle to adjust to life in their new country, often haunted by the memories and customs of their old lives in Vietnam. While some are able to survive and assimilate, others are crushed by the promise of the "American Dream."

From the dark depths of the past to the bright hopes of the future, Pati Nagle's stories range across the palette of human emotion. Named for her Theodore Sturgeon Award Finalist story, Coyote Ugly includes fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, romance, mystery, and a few surprises. The rhythms, colors, and flavors of New Mexico enrich many of the stories. Curl up with this collection and your favorite hot cuppa, and prepare to escape the ordinary.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, French Jesuits erected a mission deep in the uncharted Canadian wilderness, till they were brutally murdered by a band of renegade Iroquois.Or so the legends say. Today Ste-Claire College stands near the legendary massacre site, the mission's memory now more folklore than fact. Then Ste-Claire professor Karl Desbiens, who's soon to be a Jesuit priest himself, sets off to locate the mission ruins along with a group of eager college students. But after ten days of searching, they find nothing...until an old world evil is uncovered.

Celebrated for her award-winning political columns, criticism, and poetry, Katha Pollitt offers something new in this poignant, hilarious, and sometimes outrageous collection of stories drawn from her own life.

Whether breathlessly enthusiastic serenely calm, or really concentrating on their personal zombie issues, Crane's happy cast explore the complexities behind personal satisfaction. You Must Be This Happy to Enter exists in a world very much like our own but infused with more joy and magic. It's a place where the happy are jailed, the sincere cause confusion, and pop culture so seamlessly melds with real life that characters can walk right out of the television and come live with you.

The women in When the Messenger Is Hot are fierce and kind, damaged and optimistic. They are recovering from loss or addiction or betrayal; they are on the fringes of reality or sanity or a "conventional" life. From a woman who decides to live on the patio rooftop of her friend's apartment building, to the best-selling memoir writer who finds her identity overtaken by the actress cast in the movie version, to the daughter convinced her dead mother is in fact simply stuck at a North Dakota bus depot, their experiences of loss and love are both uniquely theirs and universal.

Demons in the Spring is a collection of 20 short stories by Joe Meno, author of the smash hits The Boy Detective Fails and Hairstyles of the Damned. In these stories, oddly modern moments occur in the most familiar of public places.

Pieces of terror, pieces of suspense, pieces of darkness combine to create Pieces of Hate, master storyteller Ray Garton's short story collection. Nine works, including "A Gift From Above", a new novel that will surely hit you from below, are here compiled for the sole purpose of scaring you onto the next page. Garton illuminates the dark corners in us all and highlights the depths of the human condition. He takes our ordinary, daily assumptions and turns them on the reader to frightening effect.

Down the Road to Eternity: New & Selected Fiction is a collection of M.A.C. Farrant’s work dating from 1985 to 2009. Satiric and philosophical in approach, indelibly marked by wit, humor, irony, playfulness, a blend of parody and science fiction, irreverent analysis and comic existentialism, these stories celebrate the literary imagination as an antidote to the stranglehold the popular media now has on the public’s imagination.

In 1990—after the Iron Curtain has lifted but before East and West Germany become one—an uneasy truce exists between the spy agencies of Berlin’s two halves. As the governments of the divided state negotiate reunification, espionage continues quietly. That calm is about to explode. An English agent, on a routine collection of microfilm on the other side of Checkpoint Charlie, is arrested for spying, and all hell threatens to break loose.

In her critically acclaimed debut story collection, Elisa Albert boldly illuminates an original cross section of disaffected young Jews. With wit, compassion, and a decidedly iconoclastic 21st-century attitude, in prose that is by turns hilarious and harrowing, Albert has created characters searching for acceptance, a happier view of the past, and above all the possibility of a future.