Showing results by publisher "Dreamscape Media, LLC" in City Life

A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: It’s close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and, ideally, very little thinking. Her first gig - watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods - turns out to be inconvenient. Her next gives way to the supernatural: announcing advertisements for shops that mysteriously disappear. As she moves from job to job, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all but something altogether more meaningful.

Distinguished for his talents as a rat killer, the nameless protagonist of Hye-young Pyun's City of Ash and Red is sent by the extermination company he works for on an extended assignment in C, a country descending into chaos and paranoia, swept by a contagious disease and flooded with trash. No sooner does he disembark than he is whisked away by quarantine officials and detained overnight. Still worse, when he finally manages to reach an old friend, he is told that his ex-wife's body was found in his apartment and that he’s the prime suspect.

My reputation with women stinks. I'll admit I haven't always treated them with the respect they deserve. That's not to say I'm a bad guy or anything. What my sisters and cousin would call toxic, I prefer to think of as selfish. But I'm ready to change everything if it means I'll have a chance with the lovely, sweet, wounded Sofia Diaz—and her adorable son Mateo. They've been through a lot with her ex—and she's still dealing with him far more often than I'd like—but I'm prepared to be there for both of them, to do whatever it takes to make them happy.

The Vanderhaven family of Manhattan has it all: wealth, prestige, good looks, and a thriving business empire. But their seemingly perfect world is ripped apart when their younger daughter, eight-year-old Brenna, runs off after overhearing her parents arguing. Out on the streets, she quickly realizes she’s lost. Even more frightening, Brenna soon realizes that a man is following her. Meanwhile, in a townhouse in Brooklyn, Callie Griffin is throwing a birthday party for her one-year-old son, Oliver. The joy of the day is ruined by her sister Lauren’s too short, drive-by appearance.

Down on her luck, former Wall Street dynamo Gabrielle Clayton agreed to move into Paul Reed’s ramshackle but affordable apartment on the condition that they keep strict personal boundaries. Then Gabrielle discovered she and Paul shared a good deal more than the rent - like one outrageous claw-foot bathtub located smack in the middle of the kitchen - and things started heating up!

Copeland Cane V, the child who fell outta Colored People Time and into America, is a fugitive. He is also just a regular teenager coming up in a terrifying world. A slightly eccentric, flip-phone loving kid with analog tendencies and a sideline hustling sneakers, the boundaries of Copeland’s life are demarcated from the jump by urban toxicity, an educational apparatus with confounding intentions, and a police state that has merged with media conglomerates - the highly rated Insurgency Alert Desk that surveils and harasses his neighborhood in the name of anti-terrorism.

In this robust, elegantly plotted, and ultimately life-affirming novel, Zoe Whittall presents a dazzling portrait of the Millennial Generation - the 25-year-olds who grew up on anti-anxiety meds, text-messaging each other truncated emotional reactions, unsure of what's public and what's private. Holding Still explores an unusual love triangle involving Billy, a former teen idol, now an anxiety-ridden agoraphobic; Josh, a shy transgendered paramedic who travels the city patching up damaged bodies; and Amy, a fashionable filmmaker coping with her first broken heart.

Joe Keen and Ana Urbanek have been a couple for a long time, with all the requisite lulls and temptations, yet they remain unmarried and without children or a mortgage, as their Midwestern values (and parents) seem to require. Now on the cusp of 40, they are both working jobs that they're not even sure they believe in anymore, but with significantly varying returns. Ana is successful; Joe is floundering; both are in limbo, caught somewhere between mainstream and alternative culture, sincerity and irony, achievement and arrested development.

In a city teeming with stories, how do lost souls find one another? It’s a question Meg Rhys doesn’t think she’s asking. Meg is a self-identified spinster librarian, satisfied with living with her cat, stacks of books, and her dead sister’s ghost in her New York City apartment. Then she becomes obsessed with an intriguing library patron and the haunted house he’s trying to research. The house has its own story to tell too, of love and war, of racism’s fallout and the ghost story that is gentrification, and of Brooklyn before it was Brooklyn.