Showing results by publisher "HarperAudio" in Literary Fiction

Cassidy Holmes isn't just a celebrity. She is "Sassy Gloss", the fourth member of the hottest pop group America has ever seen. Before Britney stunned with "Toxic", before Christina went dirrty, Gloss was the pop act that everyone idolized. Fans couldn't get enough of them, their music, and the drama that followed them like moths to a flame - until the group's sudden implosion in 2002. And at the center of it all was Sassy Cassy, the Texan with a signature smirk that had everyone falling for her.

In this stirring, reflective collection of short stories, Joyce Carol Oates ponders alternate destinies: the other lives we might have led if we’d made different choices. An accomplished writer returns to her childhood home of Yewville, but the homecoming stirs troubled thoughts about the person she might have been if she’d never left. A man in prison contemplates the gravity of his irreversible act. A student’s affair with a professor results in a pregnancy that alters the course of her life forever. Even the experience of reading is investigated.

Luke Nolan has led the Hope congregation for more than a decade, while his wife and daughters have patiently upheld what it means to live righteously. Made famous by a viral sermon on purity co-written with his eldest daughter, Abigail, Luke is the prototype of a modern preacher: tall, handsome, a spellbinding speaker. But his younger daughter Caroline has begun to notice the cracks in their comfortable life.

In 1919, Mohammed el Adl, the young Egyptian lover of British author E. M. Forster, spent six months in a jail cell. A century later, Kip Starling has locked himself in his Brooklyn basement study with a pistol and twenty-one gallons of Poland Spring to write Mohammed’s story. Kip has only three weeks until his publisher’s deadline to immerse himself in the mind of Mohammed who, like Kip, is Black, queer, an Other. The similarities don't end there.

Florence, 1500 - a city that glitters with wealth and artistic genius is also a place of fierce political intrigue, walled off from the unrest in the surrounding Tuscan countryside. In this moment, a peasant girl finds herself alone after her father is killed and her mother disappears. Young Beatrice must dare to enter the city to sell her family’s olive oil in order to survive, but also to search the streets and opium dens for her missing, grieving mother.

In Men, Women & Children - now a major motion picture starring Ansel Elgort, Adam Sandler, Judy Greer, and Jennifer Garner, and directed by Jason Reitman - Kultgen explores the pressures at work on two different generations navigating the same Internet landscape: teenagers and their parents.

These 12 stories - published over the last five years in Harper's, The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney's, Playboy, and other publications - veer from comic tales of love to social satire to suspenseful crime fiction, from hip Portland to once-hip Seattle to never-hip Spokane, from a condemned casino in Las Vegas to a bottomless lake in the dark woods of Idaho. This is a world of lost fathers and redemptive conmen, of meth tweakers on desperate odysseys and men committing suicide by fishing.

In this daringly original, charmingly twisted take on an oft-imagined tale, Nicole Galland exposes a provocative view of Godiva not only in the flesh, but in all her glory. With history exonerating her dear husband, Godiva, helped along by her steadfast companion the abbess Edgiva, defies the tyranny of a new royal villain. Never before has Countess Godiva's ride into infamy - and into an unexpected adventure of romance, deceit, and naked intrigue - been told quite like this.

At the end of the 1930s, Europe is engulfed in war. Though America is far from the fighting, the streets of New York have become a battlefield. Anti-Semitic and racist groups spread hate. Josef Klein, a German immigrant, remains immune to the troubles roiling his adopted city. Josef’s great passion is the radio. His skill and technical abilities attract the attention of influential men who offer him a job as a shortwave operator. But when Josef begins to understand what they’re doing, it’s too late....

Sakura is the story of a family who is happy, until it isn’t. Skipping back and forth in time, it begins when the narrator, Kaoru, receives a letter from his estranged father announcing he will be home in Osaka for New Year’s. The letter spurs Kaoru to go back to his childhood home, and though he is apprehensive at returning, his spirits are unexpectedly lifted when he is greeted by Sakura, the family dog.

Jihye is an ordinary woman who has never been extraordinary. In her administrative job at the Academy, she silently tolerates office politics and the absurdities of Korean bureaucracy. Forever only one misplaced email away from career catastrophe, she effectively becomes a master of the silent eye-roll and the tactical coffee run. But all her efforts to endure her superiors and the semi-hostile work environment they create are upended when a new intern, Gyuok Lee, arrives.

One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears - an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories. Ory and his wife, Max, have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day, Max’s shadow disappears, too.

Joe Flood is the professional assassin known as “the Slugger.” He’s made a career out of murder for hire, but only those who deserve it. Then a routine physical turns into a reckoning. Joe has cancer, his doctor tells him, with maybe six months to live. Joe decides to take fate into his own hands. Accessing the underground network of fellow hit men, he puts out a contract on himself: six million dollars from a Swiss bank account to the professional who will end his suffering quickly.

Newly laid off George’s internet bill is in his ex-boyfriend’s name. He’s got a spider-infested apartment, and two of the six dogs he’s walking in London have just escaped. It’s pure undiluted stress that sends him into a spiral—all the way to the year 1300. When he comes to, George recognizes the same rolling hills of Greenwich Park. But the luxuries and phone service of modernity are nowhere. In their place are locals with a bizarre, slanted speech in awe of his foreign clothes, who swiftly toss him in a dungeon.

In the present day, a woman lies in a hospital bed, watched over by her attentive, caring grandmother. The young woman was recently at a party and was seen jumping from the roof—but that couldn’t have been what happened, surely? In fits and starts, the grandmother begins to explain to her granddaughter the long tail of their family’s history, nestled in which may be the secret to why hardship and mystery have followed them through the centuries….

Perdido en lo más profundo del bosque, Beartown es un pequeño pueblo de gente que trabaja duro sin esperar que la vida sea fácil ni justa. Su único anhelo es mantener la reputación de su club de hockey sobre hielo. Por eso, cuando un evento inesperado sitúa el club al borde de la desaparición, todos quedan devastados. Y, por si fuera poco, la mitad de los jugadores de Beartown se une al equipo de Hed, el pueblo vecino, y la animosidad entre los dos eternos rivales se intensifica.

From the moment Ben and June met on New Year’s Eve, their love has seemed fated. Looking back at all the tiny, unlikely decisions that brought them together, it was easy to believe their relationship was special. But now, after several years of marriage, June is struggling as a new mum. At times, she wonders about the life she didn’t choose — what might have been if she hadn’t given up the lead role in a famous ballet to start a family. Feeling like a bad mum and more alone than ever, she writes to her deceased mother, hoping for a sign.

El año es 1846. Después de la controvertida anexión de Texas, el ejército de los EE. UU. marcha hacia el sur para provocar la guerra con México por la disputada frontera del Río Grande. Ximena Salomé es una talentosa curandera mexicana que sueña con construir una familia con el hombre que ama en la codiciada tierra que llama hogar. Pero cuando los Texas Rangers asaltan su rancho y matan a tiros a su esposo, sus sueños se reducen a cenizas. Prometiendo honrar la memoria de su esposo y defender a su país, Ximena usa sus habilidades curativas como enfermera del ejército.

Tokyo, 1938. An amateur quartet, led by the compassionate Yu, gathers to practice. Suddenly, their rehearsal is brutally interrupted by military police. In the ensuing skirmish, Yu’s violin is smashed while his son, Rei, witnesses his father’s arrest. He will never see him again. Salvaging his father’s instrument, Rei escapes thanks to a mysterious lieutenant. Paris, 2003. Raised in France, Rei–now Jacques–has dedicated his life to the broken violin’s repair: studying music, becoming an apprentice, and, eventually, a luthier.

In this intense and brilliant book, Bowles focuses on Morocco, condensing experience, emotion, and the whole history of a people into a series of short, insightful vignettes. He distills for us the very essence of Moroccan culture. With extraordinary immediacy, he takes the listener on a journey through the Moroccan centuries, pausing at points along the way to create resonant images of the country, it's landscapes, and the beliefs and characteristics of its inhabitants.