Showing results by narrator "Natasha Soudek" in All Categories

“One of Mexico’s greatest living writers,” wrote Jonathan Lethem in 2018, “we are just barely beginning to catch up to what she has to offer.” In the years since, Rivera Garza’s work has received widespread recognition: she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant for fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Yet we have still only started to discover the full range of a writer who is at once an incisive voice on migration, borders, and violence against women, as well as a high stylist in the manner of Lispector or Duras.

Dark Factory is a dance club: three floors of DJs, drinks, and customizable reality, everything you see and hear and feel. Ari Regon is the club's wild card floor manager, and Max Caspar is a stubborn DIY artist, both chasing a vision of true reality. And rogue journalist Marfa Carpenter is there to write it all down. Then a rooftop rave sets in motion a fathomless energy that may drive Ari and Max to the edge of the ultimate experience. Kathe Koja combines her award-winning writing and her skill directing immersive events to create a story that unfolds in the listener's creative mind.

Only last year, Fannie O’Brien was considered a beauty with a brain, and her future shone bright, despite the war in Europe. With her father’s sudden death and her brothers overseas, Fannie must now do the work of three men on their 200-acre farm—until eight German prisoners arrive and, just as Fannie feared, trouble comes too. Someone seems intent on causing “accidents,” and Fannie is certain the culprit is one of the two handsome older Germans—or possibly both. Can she manage the farm, keep the prisoners in line, and hold her family together through these turbulent times?

It is 2085 and Laisve is learning to use the ancient waterways to travel through water and time. Sifting through the detritus of a fallen city known as The Brook, she discovers a talisman that will connect her with people from the past two centuries, including a squad of laborers at work on a huge national monument to liberty. As waters rise and a police state encroaches, Laisve must find her way back to the early days of her imperfect country, to forge a bond that might save all their lives—and their shared dream of freedom.

Home-decorating expert Melissa Michaels invites you to experience the peace and joy that come from a well-balanced life that nurtures your home and soul throughout the year.

Midnight, June 13, 1942: Peter Burger stands on a foggy beach, ears primed as a submarine hull scrapes the sandy sea bottom. He has endured seventeen months in a Gestapo prison and seventeen days on a Nazi U-boat only to have landed on American shores with six boxes of explosives and no escape. After slipping into New York City, Peter finds himself at a massive military parade where he meets Grete Baum, a German-Jewish refugee grappling with loneliness and loss. Grete is drawn to Peter’s brooding vulnerability, and the pair instantly bond.

The great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser lived eccentrically on the fringes of society, shocking his Berlin friends by enrolling in butler school and later developing an urban-nomad lifestyle in the Swiss capital, Bern, before checking himself into a psychiatric clinic.

Lotte Reiniger (1899-1981) was a German film director and animator best known for The Adventures of Prince Achmed, which was released in 1926 and is the oldest surviving animated movie. (It came out a full 11 years before Disney’s Snow White!) As a little kid, Reiniger loved reading fairy tales and fell in love with puppetry. At school, she learned about paperschnitte, or papercuts, which helped her create her signature style of silhouettes. She grew up to make more than 40 films throughout her long career.

Why has music so often served as an accomplice to transcendent expressions of gender? Why did the query "is he musical?" become code, in the 20th century, for "is he gay?" Why is music so inherently queer? For Sasha Geffen, the answers lie, in part, in music’s intrinsic quality of subliminal expression, which, through paradox and contradiction, allows rigid gender roles to fall away in a sensual and ambiguous exchange between performer and listener. Glitter Up the Dark traces the history of this gender fluidity in pop music from the early 20th century to the present day.

Three years have passed since the devastation of Golyna. Anna, once the maker of immortals, continues to fight the evil she unwillingly created through her rune-carving magic. Secreted away in an isolated mountain monastery, she works as a teacher to young scribes, guiding them toward runes that foster peace rather than endless war. So when the tracker who murdered her brother comes to Anna’s redoubt, begging for his eternal runes to be undone, Anna agrees to grant his wish on one condition - that he aid her in rooting out the remnants of Volna, a genocidal regime....

1954: In South East Asia, Cade Martin, hero of the Midnight Front during World War II, chases ghosts and flees his past. In the United States, Briet Segfrunsdóttir heads the Pentagon’s top-secret magickal warfare program. And in South America, Anja Kernova hunts fugitive Nazi sorcerers with the help of a powerful magickal tome known as the Iron Codex. In an ever-more dangerous world, a chance encounter sparks an international race to find Anja and steal the Iron Codex.

Over a millennium in the past, humans fleeing Earth in slower-than-light vessels discovered the Waywork, an abandoned alien superhighway system that allows instantaneous travel from star to star. The problem: there are a finite number of Waypoint nodes - and the burgeoning population of humans is hemmed in as a result. Furthermore, humanity is divided into contending Starstates. One of the strongest is based on an oligarchy ruling families, but still mostly democratic. The other is a totalitarian nightmare. War seems inevitable.

Three long years have passed since Anna, First of Tomas, survived the purge in Malijad after being forced to use her scribe sigils to create an army of immortals. Safely ensconced in the shelter of the Nest, a sanctuary woven by one of her young allies, Anna spends her days tutoring the gifted yet traumatized scribe, Ramyi, and coming to terms with her growing attachment to an expatriate soldier in her company. Away from her refuge, war drums continue to beat. Thwarted in her efforts to locate the elusive tracker and bring him to justice, Anna turns to the state of Nahora for help.

It's the summer of 2008. Chicago's Hyde Park senator is running for the White House, the city is vying to host the 2016 Summer Olympics, and "Poison", a lethal form of heroin, has killed more than 250 people, including dozens of suburban girls from prominent families. Natalie Delaney, a crime reporter from the Chicago Times, discovers that daughters of Democratic powerhouses are the real targets. Obsessed with finding who is behind the killings, Natalie becomes entangled in an underworld where drugs, cops, gangs, politics, and privilege collide.

Three years have passed since Joelle Gordon came home to Landon, Minnesota, following her heart back to her family of women and their little café on Flickertail Lake. Joelle, her sister Jillian, and her daughter Camille have grown closer through the shared heartaches and passionate loves they experienced since that first summer. Now the Shore Leave Café is again basking under the brilliant June sunshine, and this summer promises to be hotter than ever.

A gorgeous stranger in an old photograph. A desperate search from another century. And a mystery Camille Gordon cannot resist. It has been two years since Camille discovered that she was going to be a teenage mother. Abandoned by her child's father, Camille is determined that she and her daughter will make it on their own. When she discovers an old picture hidden in a trunk in her grandmother's attic, Camille is at once drawn to the man in the image.

Tish Gordon has worked tirelessly to earn a law degree from her father's alma mater in Chicago. Although the Shore Leave Café will always be in her heart, Tish wants nothing short of a high-profile law career in the glamorous city. There is just one minor roadblock - a summer internship in Jalesville, Montana, where a fast-talking company is snapping up acreage and threatening local business. Tish heads west, determined to accomplish the internship and return to Chicago, but Montana has distractions of its own, like a sexy musician/cowboy.

Joelle Gordon is leaving Chicago and her cheating husband to head for her hometown of Landon, Minnesota. There, she returns to the Shore Leave Café, the lakeside diner the Davis women have run for decades. Joelle's family, including her three teenaged daughters, Camille, Tish, and Ruthann, is made up of strong women who have long believed in a curse upon them - a curse that robs them of the men they love.

Twelve years ago, Jillian Henriksen cut off all her hair and placed it in her young husband's hands as he was buried. After his tragic accident, she clung to the only remaining stability she had - her young son Clint, her family of women, and her job at their lakeside diner, the Shore Leave Café. Now it is summer again, and change is in the hot and humid air. Jillian's sister, Joelle, and her teenaged nieces, Camille, Tish, and Ruthann, have come home to Landon, bringing a welcome distraction.

Tourmaline Harris's life hit pause at 15, when her mom went to prison because of Tourmaline's unintentionally damning testimony. But at 18, her home life is stable, and she has a strong relationship with her father, the president of a local biker club known as the Wardens. Virginia Campbell's life hit fast-forward at 15, when her mom "sold" her into the services of Hazard, a powerful attorney: a man for whom the law is merely a suggestion.