Showing results by narrator "George Wilson" in All Categories

For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.

A terrifying page-turner in classic Crichton tradition, masterfully combining the elements of a heart-pounding thriller with cutting-edge technology. the result is a tale so realistic, so scary, readers won?be able to put it down. Deep in the middle of the Nevada desert, the Xymos Corporation...

Tourist season is swinging into high gear in Miami. So are the activities of a bizarre terrorist group determined to keep the hapless "snowbirds" away. Armed with bombs, weed, and jumbled credos, they move toward their grand target, the Orange Bowl Parade, with plans to bring Miami and its tourist trade to a halt.

Persecuted refugees from six separate alien races have migrated to the idyllic planet Jijo. And despite their incredible diversity, the inhabitants live together in blissful harmony. However, settlement on Jijo is illegal - and it's only a matter of time before the residents of this forbidden paradise are discovered by the galactic powers-that-be.

Ex-reporter Joe Winder had been working in the public relations department of a sleazy family entertainment park, The Amazing Kingdom of Thrills, when he chanced upon a news-breaking story inspired by the disappearance of two blue-tongued voles and the bizarre death of Orky, the killer whale.

In big stakes bass fishing tournaments, contestants will do anything to win. Maybe that's why there is a corpse floating in Coon Bog. Now it's up to R J Decker, novice private investigator, to find out who was dying to get the biggest fish. Help comes in the unlikely form of Skink, a half-mad hermit with a taste for road kill.

the undisputed master of the techno-thriller has written his most entertaining book yet.Once again Michael Crichton gives us his trademark combination of page-turning suspense, cutting-edge technology, and extraordinary research. State of Fear is a superb blend of edge-of-your-seat suspense and...

From Stephen E. Ambrose, bestselling author of Band of Brothers and D-Day, the inspiring story of the ordinary men of the U.S. army in northwest Europe from the day after D-Day until the end of the bitterest days of World War II. In this riveting account, historian Stephen E. Ambrose continues...

Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, Leo Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his death so much as a passing thought. But one day, death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise he is brought face to face with his own mortality.

Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executor of a former lover's estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually, death, drugs, madness, and marriage combine to leave Oepida in isolation on the threshold of revelation, awaiting The Crying of Lot 49.

Private William Mandella is a reluctant hero in an interstellar war against an unknowable and unconquerable alien enemy. But his greatest test will be when he returns home. Relativity means that for every few months' tour of duty, centuries have passed on Earth, isolating the combatants ever more from the world for whose future they are fighting.

In a sleepy steel-mill town, the ultimate battle between Good and Evil is about to begin . . . Sinnissippi Park, in Hopewell, Illinois, has long hidden a mysterious evil, locked away from humankind by powers greater than most could even imagine. But now the malevolent creatures that normally...

No espionage missions have been kept more secret than those involving American submarines. Now, Blind Man's Bluff shows for the first time how the Navy sent submarines wired with self-destruct charges into the heart of Soviet seas to tap crucial underwater telephone cables. It unveils how the...

For nearly a billion years, every known sentient species in the universe has been the result of genetic and cultural guidance - or "uplifting" - by a previously uplifted patron race. Then humans are discovered. Having already uplifted chimps and dolphins, humanity clearly qualifies as an intelligent species, but did they actually evolve their own intelligence, or did some mysterious patron race begin the process, then suddenly abandon Earth?

In the year 2043, the Ngumi War rages. Limited nuclear strikes have been used on Atlanta and two enemy cities, but the war goes on, fought by 'soldierboys'—indestructible war machines operated by remote control by soldiers hundreds of miles away. Julian Class is one of these soldiers, and for him war is truly hell. The psychological strain of being jacked-in to his soldierboy—and the genocidal results—are becoming too much to bear.

Maybe ninety percent of the population of Dade County, Florida, have emerged unscathed from the devastating hurricane. It's the other ten percent that are causing the trouble. It seems that all the petty crooks and ne'er-do-wells in the south have converged on Dade to reap their ill-gotten gains from the chaos. Honeymooners, Max and Bonnie Lamb attempt to record the goings-on with their video camera—but they soon wish they'd gone to Disney World instead...

Emerging science is showing that cholesterol levels are a poor predictor of heart disease and that standard prescriptions for lowering it, such as ineffective low-fat/high-carb diets and serious, side-effect-causing statin drugs, obscure the real causes of heart disease. Even doctors at leading institutions have been misled for years based on creative reporting of research results from pharmaceutical companies intent on supporting the $31-billion-a-year cholesterol-lowering drug industry.

On the planet Jijo, peace is upended when the starship Streaker arrives, bringing with it knowledge of a two-billion-year-old fleet and hordes of followers eager to exploit its power. Publishers Weekly hails Brin's "extraordinary capacity to handle a wide-ranging narrative and to create ... complex alien races."

When Streaker - the first starship designed and crewed by dolphins - discovers a derelict ancient armada with evidence of the first sentient species ever, she sets off a war between dozens of galactic races eager to use the information for their own advancement.

Jack Tagger is a frustrated journalist. His outspoken views have relegated him to the obituary page, and his paper's owner has decreed that his by-line will never again grace the front page. But Jack has stumbled across a peach of a story. James Stomarti, rock musician extraordinaire, has died in a diving accident, and whilst researching the obituary, Jack realises that his glamorous widow may have had a vested interest in her husband's untimely death.