Showing results by publisher "Dreamscape Media, LLC" in Literary Fiction

In 1797, young Billy Budd is impressed into naval service. It is a perilous time for a British Royal Navy still reeling from mutinies and marauding French ships. When Billy is forcibly transferred to HMS Bellipotent, he evokes the wrath of John Claggart, the ship's Master-at-arms. Claggart falsely accuses Billy of conspiracy to mutiny, a charge that will have a profound effect on the fates of both seamen.

In New York's Catskill Mountains before the American Revolution, a Dutch American villager named Rip Van Winkle falls asleep and wakes up 20 years later without realizing how much time has passed. Unaware that the Revolutionary War has taken place, he must come to terms with the changes he encounters.

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.

Stevie, a recovering alcoholic and kitchen manager of Chappy’s, a small-chain restaurant, is frantically trying to prevent the people around her from going supernova: her PTSD-suffering veteran son, her uproariously demented parents, the polyglot eccentrics who work in her kitchen, the blind geriatric dog she inherits, and a damaged 5-year-old who landed on her doorstep and might just be her granddaughter. In the tight grip of new corporate owners, Stevie battles corporate’s “restructuring” to save her kitchen.

Letting no good deal go undone, the Good Buy Girls are ready to pounce on the St. Stanley flea market, where wealthy Vera Madison is selling off her vintage clothing. The widow’s wardrobe is just what Maggie Gerber needs to give her second-hand shop, My Sister’s Closet, the edge over vindictive rival Summer Phillips, who’s opened her own second-hand shop across the street. But when Vera is found dead, it turns out that she collected enemies like Dior gowns - and had more than a few skeletons in her walk-in closet. Now it’s up to Maggie and the Good Buy Girls to find the killer.

Set in Iran and New York City, Dalia Sofer's second novel, Man of My Time, tells the story of Hamid Mozaffarian, who is as alienated from himself as he is from the world. After decades of ambivalence about his work for the Iranian, Hamid travels to New York, where he encounters his estranged family and retrieves the ashes of his father - who was cremated despite his religion - to honor his dying wish to be buried in Iran.

When Tyron Shaw returns to his hometown of Las Vegas after 11 years in the Marines, he’s surprised to discover that two of his best friends from childhood are all anyone is talking about: Antoine Deco, three years out of prison, hasn’t lost a boxing match since his release and is fighting tonight in the undercard to the fight of the decade; and Keenan Quinn, a police officer who killed an unarmed teenager and escaped punishment from the courts, is the subject of a protest tomorrow morning.

A mysterious beachcomber appears one day on the coastal bluffs near the small town of Carverville, a place whose best days are long behind it. Who is he, and why has he returned after nearly 40 years? Carverville's prodigal son, James, serendipitously finds work at a gentrified motel, but his homecoming soon takes a sinister turn when he and a local teenager make a gruesome discovery on the beach. It forces him to reckon with the ghosts of his past‚ and the dangers of the present.

An unidentified body is discovered in New York City, with numbers and symbols written in blood near the corpse. Gilmo, a North Korean national who interprets the world through numbers, formulas, and mathematical theories, is arrested on the spot. Angela, a CIA operative, is assigned to gain his trust and access his unique thought-process.

The interwoven tales of three women unfold in the voices of Sarah, Miriam, and Beth, whose unshakable friendship takes root in a Buffalo college dorm in the late 1960s. Fueled by the optimism and bravado of that era, they charge into adulthood with high expectations and lofty ideas. They were, as Beth would later observe, the first generation of women to feel entitled to interesting lives. At times, they find themselves living long distances from each other as each of them seeks new directions and new locales. Nonetheless, they remain deeply connected in the decades after college.

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.

Amelia MacQueen has lost her favorite son, Gavin, to a suspicious drowning, and she’s been awarded temporary custody of her 12-year-old daughter, Heaven, who she reluctantly takes in. The daughter of drug addicts, who has long been left to her own devices, Heaven does not appreciate her grandmother’s constant critical ministrations, and the pair quickly butt heads. She instead bonds with Uncle Daniel, Amelia's agoraphobic older son. Through the wall between their rooms, Daniel spins Celtic tales for Heaven from the Isle of Skye, where the family's ancestors lived.

In visceral, embodied prose, Fragoza's imperfect characters are drawn with a sympathetic tenderness as they struggle against circumstances and conditions designed to defeat them.

As a wealthy, young real-estate developer in Los Angeles, T. lives an isolated life. He has always kept his distance from people - from his doting mother to his crass fraternity brothers - but remains unaware of his loneliness until one night, while driving to Las Vegas, he hits a coyote on the highway. The experience unnerves him and inspires a transformation that leads him to question his business pursuits for the first time in his life, to take a chance at falling in love, and to begin breaking into zoos across the country....

The Fehler sisters wanted to be more than bug girls but growing up in a fourth-generation family pest-control business in rural Missouri, their path was fixed. The family talked about Fehler Family Exterminating at every meal, even when their mom said to separate the business from the family, an impossible task. They tried to escape work with trips to their trailer camp on the Mississippi River, but the sisters did more fighting than fishing. If only there was a son to lead rural Missouri insect control and guide the way through a crumbling patriarchy.

Lions, Komodo dragons, dogs, monkeys, and pheasants - all have shared spotlights and tabloid headlines with celebrities such as Sharon Stone, Thomas Edison, and David Hasselhoff. In this critically acclaimed collection, Lydia Millet hilariously tweaks these unholy communions to run a stake through the heart of our fascination with famous people and pop culture.

At the opening of My Happy Life, the unnamed narrator of this bittersweet fictional memoir has been abandoned in a locked room of a defunct hospital for the mentally ill. She hasn't seen the nice man who brings her food in days; she's eaten the soap and the toothpaste; she tried to eat the plaster on her walls, a dietary adventure that ended none too well. And yet, curiously, the narrator is happy. Despite a lifetime of neglect, physical abuse, and loss, she's incapable of perceiving slight or injury.

The three dead geniuses who invented the atomic bomb - Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and Enrico Fermi - mysteriously appear in Sante Fe, New Mexico, in 2003, nearly 60 years after they watched history's first mushroom cloud rise over the New Mexico desert. One by one, they are discovered by a shy librarian, who takes them in and devotes herself to them. Faced with the evidence of their nuclear legacy, the scientists embark on a global disarmament campaign that takes them from Hiroshima to Nevada to the United Nations.

Told from five points of view, this novel takes place over the three wild days in which these lives intersect.

With the rapidly cascading Asian Financial Crisis threatening to go global and Korea in imminent meltdown, investment banker Dae Joon finds himself back in his native Seoul as part of an international team brought in to rescue the country from sovereign default. For Dae Joon - also known by his American name of Shane, after the cowboy movie his father so loved - the stakes are personal. Raised in the US and Harvard Business School - educated, Dae Joon is a jangnam, a firstborn son, bound by tradition to follow in the footsteps of his forebears.