Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in United States

Two divorces have taught Mariela Estevez that she's better suited to being a mistress than a wife. Whose heart needs all that "forever after" trouble? Still, her affair with her married lover, Hector, has become problematic - especially because he's also a tenant in her apartment building in the heart of Miami's Calle Ocho in Little Havana. But when Hector is found dead just steps from Mariela's back door, on the eve of her fortieth birthday, she's forced to examine her life - and come up with a plan to save it, fast.

His Fifth Precinct cases have taken him to West Coast Chinatowns and back, and along the way NYPD detective Jack Yu has processed a dozen dead bodies, been beaten by Triad thugs, been mauled by a pit bull, and been shot twice.

He's also killed two men. He is en route to an appointment with the department shrink when an Asian body turns up in the Harlem River. Quickly assigned to the case, Jack finds a corpse with no identification and faces questions as to how - and why - the dead man wound up in the water.

Kate Chopin is a widely considered the forerunner to the feminist authors of the twentieth century. Focusing on themes of race and gender, her short stories largely center on life in rural Louisiana. In "The Story of an Hour," Louise Mallard has just learned that her husband is dead - believed to have died during a train accident. Her family fears that the news will kill Louise, who suffers from a weak heart.

In American Literature, all main periods are covered, from colonial times to the present movement toward cultural diversity. Also covered are key themes and personalities, with emphasis on major figures, including Ben Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Tennessee Williams, Alice Walker, and many more.

The songs and calls of 50 of the more common birds of England and North America are paired with such classic poems as "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe, "The Oriole's Secret" by Emily Dickinson, "An Essay on Man" by Alexander Pope, "Roadless Area" by Paul Brooks, "To a Skylark" by Percy Bysshe Shelley, and more.

Torn by a quirk of fate from his life as a dilettante and intellectual, Humphrey van Weydon finds himself at the whim of the ruthless Wolf Larsen. The 2 men - the one youthful, idealistic, and upper-class, the other ruthless, dangerous, self-taught, and self-determined - inevitably become adversaries. As he does in Call of the Wild and White Fang, Jack London dramatizes in this story the violent encounter between safe, genteel comfort and a brutal set of circumstances.

Twenty years ago Martin Limón published his first mystery featuring Sergeant George Sueño, a young Mexican American army detective stationed on the US Eighth Army base in South Korea in the early 1970s, the heart of the Cold War. George and his investigating partner, the rowdy and short-fused Sergeant Ernie Bascom, are assigned cases in which the Eighth Army has come into conflict with local Korean law enforcement - often incidents in which American soldiers, who are not known for being on their best behavior in their Asian host country, have committed a crime.

As he was composing what was to become his most enduring and popular book, E. B. White was obeying that oft-repeated maxim: "Write what you know." Helpless pigs, silly geese, clever spiders, greedy rats - White knew all of these characters in the barns and stables where he spent his favorite hours. In The Story of Charlotte's Web, Michael Sims shows how White solved what critic Clifton Fadiman once called "the standing problem of the juvenile-fantasy writer: how to find, not another Alice, but another rabbit hole."

This delightful collection of lesser-known gems by Mark Twain begins with the story of a town called Hadleyburg, which prides itself on the honesty of its citizens. One day a citizen of Hadleyburg offends a stranger passing through, who vows to take his revenge by revealing just how corruptible the sanctimonious town really is. Twain is at his best here, poking fun at common hypocrisy as the self-satisfied pillars of the community are done in by their own greed.

Julie Harris stars in this one-woman play by William Luce based on the life and writings of Isak Dinesen, author of Out of Africa.

This collection contains poems Elizabeth Browning wrote in her early days as well as the last poems she wrote before her death at 55: ballads, religious, social-reforming, and political verse. Included are: "The Dream," "The Image of God," and "The Tempest."

Lessons at the Halfway Point is a deeply thought-provoking look at one man’s courageous journey to understand life from the perspective of having just turned 40. It is both a wry reflection on the past as well as an optimistic look to a challenging future. Nothing escapes Michael Levine’s critical eye, insightful mind, and often humorous spin on our world and ourselves.

The handsome Texas sailor who offers dinner to a runaway in Central Park. The Midwestern college girl who stops a cop in Times Square for restaurant advice. The Brooklyn man on a midnight subway who helps a weary tourist find her way to Chinatown. The Columbia University graduate student who encounters an unexpected object of beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art....

Originally privately published in Paris, Three Stories and Ten Poems holds an interesting history. The three stories, “Up in Michigan", “Out of Season”, and “My Old Man”, were first seen in this collection, but “Up in Michigan” was banned and not considered publishable in America until 1938 because of its blatant sexuality. In addition, this original publication of the three stories is all that remains of Hemingway’s early works after his suitcase containing the originals was stolen.

In rural North Georgia two decades after the Civil War, 13-year-old Lulu Hurst reaches high into her father's bookshelf and pulls out an obscure book, The Truth of Mesmeric Influence. Deemed gangly and undesirable, Lulu wants more than a lifetime of caring for her disabled baby brother, Leo, with whom she shares a profound and supernatural mental connection.

Judith Kratt inherited all the Kratt family had to offer - the pie safe, the copper clock, the murder that no one talks about - and she knows in her old bones that it's time to make an inventory of her household and its valuables. But she finds that cataloging the family belongings - as well as their misfortunes - won't contain her family's secrets, not when her wayward sister suddenly returns, determined to expose skeletons that the Kratts had hoped to take to their grave.

When Jack Parker’s father dies, Jack knows one thing: Tom Parker was a good man. Beyond that, decades of distance and silence had kept the two men from truly knowing each other. Jack attends the funeral with the hope he can shovel some dirt onto Tom’s casket, collect a few commiserations, and put miles between himself and the questions he’d let simmer since he’d left home years before. But when a group of strangers appears at the funeral, Jack realizes he has more questions than answers about how his father actually lived his life.

E.E. Cummings' military career culminated in a comedy of errors leading to his arrest and imprisonment for treason, as he memorably recounts in The Enormous Room. Cummings transforms a tale of unjust incarceration into a high-energy romp and a celebration of the indomitable human spirit that ranks with the best of its contemporaries, including the works of Hemingway and Dos Passos. This edition restores a significant amount of material deleted from the book’s initial publication in 1922.

The Triumph of the Egg is a fictional panorama of a great region of our country, unfolded by a writer who - to quote the New York Times - "depicts life in the Midwest as Dostoevsky pictured the many colored life of Russia, with almost as wonderful a touch of genius, with a more concentrated and daring skill." This coveted 1921 collection is an example of what a book of stories can be when a writer of vision deals with the materials of American life.