Showing results by publisher "Simon & Schuster Audio" in World Literature

Humanitarian, entrepreneur, and content creator Connor Franta first captivated listeners with A Work in Progress, ruminating on his Midwestern roots to his early start as a visionary and online thought-leader. He continued his soul-searching-through-a-broken-heart with Note to Self, challenging listeners - and himself - to ponder the spectrum of humanity and their place within it. Now as Franta approaches 30, life is no less confusing, but he finds this journey endlessly fascinating.

In the summer of 1986, in a small Chinese village, ten-year-old Junie receives a momentous letter from her parents, who had left for America years ago: her father promises to return home and collect her by her twelfth birthday. But Junie’s growing determination to stay put in the idyllic countryside with her beloved grandparents threatens to derail her family’s shared future.

In this uproariously funny debut collection, award-winning writer and performer Isaac Oliver serves up a comedic cornucopia of sketches, vignettes, lists, and diaries from his life as a young, fanciful, and extremely single gay man in New York City. Whether he's hooking up with a man who dresses as a dolphin, suffering on airplanes and buses next to people with Food from Home, or hovering around an impenetrable circle of attractive people at a cocktail party, Oliver captures the messy, moving, and absurd moments of urban life as we live it today.

Stephen Kuusisto was born legally blind - but he was also raised in the 1950s and taught to deny his blindness in order to "pass" as sighted. Stephen attended public school, rode a bike, and read books pressed right up against his nose. As an adult, he coped with his limited vision by becoming a professor in a small college town, memorizing routes for all of the places he needed to be. Then, at the age of 38, he was laid off. With no other job opportunities in his vicinity, he would have to travel to find work.

At the center of The Lawgiver is Margo Solovei, a brilliant young writer-director who has rejected her rabbinical father’s strict Jewish upbringing to pursue a career in the arts. When an Australian multi-billionaire promises to finance a movie about Moses if the script meets certain standards, Margo does everything she can to land the job, including a reunion with her estranged first love, an influential lawyer with whom she still has unfinished business. Two other key characters in the novel are Herman Wouk himself and his wife of more than 60 years, Betty Sarah, who, almost against their will, find themselves entangled in the Moses movie .

Carlisa “Carli” Henton is a musician and songwriter hoping to follow in her father’s musical footsteps. But, biding her time until she makes it big in the music industry, she works as a junior account manager at a big-name media company to cover her New York City rent. Carli meticulously balances her work with her musical endeavors as a songwriter—until a chance meeting with rising star Tau Anderson sends her calculated world into a frenzy. Their worlds collide and quickly blur the strict lines Carli has drawn between her business and her personal life.

Ernesto Vega has lived many lives, from pig farmer to construction worker to famed luchador El Rey Coyote, yet he has always worn a mask. He was discovered by a local lucha libre trainer at a time when luchadores—Mexican wrestlers donning flamboyant masks and capes—were treated as daredevils or rock stars. Ernesto found fame, rapidly gaining name rec­ognition across Mexico, but at great expense, nearly costing him his marriage to his wife Elena.

Jin-Lu should be happy. Princess Yi-Nereen of Kerina Rut and Prince Kadrin of Kerina Sol have reunited after twelve long years, having survived a near-apocalypse. They are safe and in love—thanks to Jin—and they want her to join them for their upcoming nuptials in Kerina Sol. But their happy ending came at the cost of Jin’s. Jin lost everything in the fallout of saving the world. Now she’s Talentless, scrabbling to eke out a living in the lowest echelons of society. All she wants is to be left alone with her shameful secret, but the storms that sweep the wastes have other plans.

At seventeen, Angela returns to the place where she was raised—a stunning island town that lies at the border of Canada and Minnesota—where she finds that an eager developer is planning a hydroelectric dam that will leave sacred land flooded and abandoned. Joining up with three other concerned residents, Angela fights the project, reconnecting with her ancestral roots as she does so.

Andrea Rodríguez is nine years old when her mother whisks her and her brother, Pablo, away from Woronoco, the tiny Massachusetts factory town that is the only home they’ve known. With no plan and no money, she leaves them with family in the mountainside villages of Puerto Rico and promises to return.

In 1978 Andy Warhol and Truman Capote decided to write a Broadway play. Andy suggested that he record their private conversations over the period of a few months, and that these tapes would be the source material for the play. The tapes were then filed away and forgotten. Their play was never completed. Now, award-winning director Rob Roth brings their vision to life after a years’ long search to unearth the 80 hours of tapes between two of the most daring artists of postwar America.

From internationally best-selling author and “rising star of Southern fiction” (Mary Alice Monroe, New York Times best-selling author) Kristy Woodson Harvey comes the third novel in her Peachtree Bluff series, in which a secret threatens the tight-knit bond between a trio of sisters and their mother.

A happily married woman's perfect life shatters when her husband turns up dead hundreds of miles away from where he should have been, and she suddenly discovers there was a part of him about which she knew nothing.

Ingvild Rishøi is one of Scandinavia’s most revered literary voices, winner of the Dobloug Prize from the Swedish Academy, and her American debut Brightly Shining made her into a national bestseller and earned her a wide English-language readership. Now, in the highly acclaimed and award-winning Winter Stories, Rishøi paints three vivid and evocative portraits of the lives of those existing on the fringes of society.

This prizewinning novel weaves together four animal odysseys in a poignant meditation on migration, displacement, and the inextricable human and natural worlds. In Only a Little While Here, award-winning author María Ospina evokes a sensation birders know well—the gratification to be had through close, humble observation of nature.

1943, El Paso, Texas. La adolescente Nena pasa sus días cuidando de los hijos pequeños de sus hermanas mayores y anhelando una vida de aventuras. Las premociones y desvanecimientos que ha padecido desde la niñez están empeorando, y a Nena le preocupa acabar como la espeluznante curandera de su calle. Reza por recibir ayuda y cuando la misteriosa Hermana Benedicta llega una noche, la sigue a través de los límites del espacio y del tiempo. En el México colonial, Nena desarrolla su poder, encuentra el amor y aprende que la magia siempre tiene un precio.

The final installment in a long journey of healing is the fieriest of them all. Out of the Ashes offers a roadmap for listeners seeking to emerge from devastation. Divided into seven sections—The Destruction, The End, The Quiet, The Wrath, The Transformation, The Arising, The Resurgence—this very personal and engaging new collection from prolific poet Courtney Peppernell illuminates a powerful journey of resilience and survival. It masterfully charts the process of rising again after your life has been burned to the ground.

Rebecca Roanhorse’s first publication, “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™”, was awarded both the Nebula and Hugo award for best short story, and on its strength, Roanhorse was awarded the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Although Roanhorse began to publish novels including Trail of Lightning and Black Sun, she has continued to write piercing stories that examine the American experience through marginalized perspectives. “River of Bones” returns to the Sixth World series with a novella, this time from Kai’s perspective, as he and Maggie travel back to where he grew up.

This imaginative and singular poetry collection interrogates the broadest ideas surrounding the humble pig—farm animal, men/masculinity, police and state violence, desire, queerness, global food systems, religion/Judaism and law—to reimagine various chaotic histories of the body, faith, ecology, desire, hygiene, and power. Sam Sax draws on autobiography and history to create poems that explore topics ranging from drag queens and Miss Piggy to pig farming and hog lagoons.

Composed of several interconnected stories, each taking place in a year ending with the number six, ironically a number that in Chinese divination signifies “a smooth life,” Dear Chrysanthemums is a novel about the scourge of inhumanity, survival, and past trauma that never leaves. The women in these stories are cooks, musicians, dancers, protestors, mothers and daughters, friends and enemies, all inexplicably connected in one way or another.