Showing results by publisher "HarperAudio" in World Literature

We have three souls, or so I'd been told. But only in death could I confirm this.... So begins the haunting and captivating tale, set in 1935 China, of the ghost of a young woman named Leiyin, who watches her own funeral from above and wonders why she is being denied entry to the afterlife. Beside her are three souls - stern and scholarly yang; impulsive, romantic yin; and wise, shining hun - who will guide her toward understanding. She must, they tell her, make amends.

Wealthy, beautiful Naneé was born with a spirit of adventure. For her, learning to fly is freedom. When German tanks roll across the border and into Paris, this woman with an adorable dog and a generous heart joins the resistance. Known as the Postmistress because she delivers information to those in hiding, Naneé uses her charms and skill to house the hunted and deliver them to safety.

Chef extraordinaire Gina Foxton doesn't expect anything to be handed to her on a platter. After years of hard work, the former runner-up Miss Teen Vidalia Onion is now the host of her own local Georgia public television show called Fresh Start, and she's dating the show's producer. But when her show gets canceled - and she catches her boyfriend in flagrante delicto with the boss' wife - Gina realizes that she's meant for bigger and better things. Namely, a gig on national television.

From the elections of Barack Obama and Donald Trump to the tragic events of Ferguson and Charlottesville, the subject of race has come to the forefront of American consciousness. Legendary satirist D. L. Hughley offers his own cutting observations on this contentious issue that continues to traumatize the nation, a wound made more painful by the ongoing comments and actions of the 45th president. Hughley uses humor to draw attention to injustice, sardonically offering advice on a number of lessons, like "How to make cops feel more comfortable while they're handcuffing you".

C. S. Lewis offers a magisterial take on the literature and poetry of one of the most consequential periods in world history, providing deep insight into some of the greatest writers of the age, including Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, William Tyndale, John Knox, Dr. Johnson, Richard Hooker, Hugh Latimer, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, and Thomas Cranmer.

Trixie Nguyen is determined to make her sex toy business a success, proving to her traditional Vietnamese parents that she can succeed in a nontraditional career. She's made a fresh start in Washington, DC, and her first pop-up event is going well - until she runs into the ex who dumped her. With a Post-it note.

An experienced psychologist, Maggie carefully maintains emotional distance from her patients. But when she meets a young Indian woman who tried to kill herself, her professional detachment disintegrates. Cut off from her family in India, Lakshmi is desperately lonely and trapped in a loveless marriage to a domineering man who limits her world to their small restaurant and grocery store.

It's the week before Christmas, and antiques dealer Weezie Foley is in a frenzy to deck out her shop for the Savannah historical district decorating contest, which she intends to win. Weezie is ready to shoot herself with her glue gun by the time she's done, but the results are stunning. She's certainly one-upped the owners of the trendy shop around the corner, but suddenly things start to go missing from her display and there seems to be an uninvited midnight visitor to her shop.

Doing a good deed for a relative offers the perfect opportunity for Sergeant Jim Chee and his wife, Officer Bernie Manuelito, to get away from the daily grind of police work. But two cases will call them back from their short vacation and separate them - one near Shiprock and the other at iconic Monument Valley.

Ernest Hemingway’s landmark short story of a veteran’s solo fishing trip in Michigan’s rugged Upper Peninsula, featuring a revelatory foreword by John N. Maclean.

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic observations of the world around them.

The poetry of Nikki Giovanni has spurred movements, turned hearts, and informed generations. She's been hailed as a firebrand, a radical, a healer, and a sage; a wise and courageous voice who has spoken out on the sensitive issues, including race and gender, that touch our national consciousness.

In 1927, South Africa passes the Immorality Act, prohibiting sexual intercourse between “Europeans” (white people) and “natives” (Black people). Those who break the draconian new law face imprisonment—for men of up to five years; for women, four years. Abram and his wife Alisa have their share of marital problems, but they also have a comfortable life in South Africa with their two young girls. But then the Act is passed. Alisa is black, and their two children are now evidence of their involvement in a union that has been criminalized by the state.

Ari Eden’s life has always been governed by strict rules. In ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn, his days are dedicated to intense study and religious rituals, and adolescence feels profoundly lonely. So when his family announces that they are moving to a glitzy Miami suburb, Ari seizes his unexpected chance for reinvention. Enrolling in an opulent Jewish academy, Ari is stunned by his peers’ dizzying wealth, ambition, and shameless pursuit of life’s pleasures.

Daniel Abe, a young doctor in Chicago, is finally coming back to Hawai'i. He has his own reason for returning to his childhood home, but it is not to revisit the past, unlike his Uncle Koji. Koji lives with the memories of Daniel’s mother, Mariko, the love of his life, and the scars of a life hard-lived. He can’t wait to see Daniel, who he’s always thought of as a son, but he knows the time has come to tell him the truth about his mother, and his father.

At the age of sixty-one, Judith Shakespeare, a midwife-apothecary and twin of the long-dead Hamnet, must flee provincial Stratford on horseback to avoid arrest for witchcraft. Her traveling companions are a zealous Puritan woman and child who have been displaced by civil war—the bloody seventeenth-century strife between Royalists and Roundheads. Judith is also leaving her marriage, which has foundered since the wrenching loss of two adult sons to the plague.

“Short stories have to accomplish a nearly impossible magic trick: to introduce a world often much stranger than our own and make you care about it in a matter of pages,” writes R. F. Kuang in her introduction. “The most important part of this magic trick is just a willingness to get weird.” The stories in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 are brimming with bizarre and otherworldly premises.

From the mid-century metropolis of Chicago to the windswept ancestral lands of the Dakota people, to the bleak and brutal Indian boarding schools, A Council of Dolls is the story of three women, told in part through the stories of the dolls they carried….

Exquisitely written, a blend of ghost stories, myths, and song, The Woman Who Climbed Trees is a haunting, deeply felt multi-generational story that illuminates the transitional nature of women’s lives and the feeling of loss they experience, as they give up one home and family to become part of another.

Southern belle BeBe Loudermilk has lost all her worldly possessions, thanks to a brief but disastrous relationship with the gorgeous Reddy, an "investment counselor" who turns out to be a con man. All that's left is a ramshackle 1950s motel on Tybee Island, an eccentric beach town that calls itself a drinking village with a fishing problem.