Showing results by narrator "Natasha Soudek" in All Categories

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.

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.

Nivedita (a.k.a. Identitti), a well-known blogger and doctoral student, is in awe of her supervisor—postcolonial and race studies professor Saraswati. But her life and sense of self are turned upside down when it emerges that Saraswati is actually white. Nivedita’s praise of Saraswati during a radio interview just hours before the news breaks calls into question her own reputation as a young activist. Following the uproar, Nivedita is forced to reflect on the key moments in her life, when she doubted her identity and her place in the world.

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.

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.

Lash by bloody lash, the she-devil from Dallas would get her revenge.

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.

Emma is a wolf-shifter on the run from humans who killed her parents 15 years ago. When she steps on an old trap in the Tennessee woods, she is truly screwed. Hungry and tired from weeks of running, she assumes she's going to die. Liam and Jaden are also wolf-shifters. They're staying in a cabin in the wilderness for the summer to catalog the plant life in the area. Hoping to spend lazy months enhancing their own relationship and escaping women altogether, they are surprised to find a trapped female wolf on their first day at the cabin.

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.

With a particular focus on obsession and the abnormal, We So Seldom Look on Love explores life at its quirky extremes, pushing past limits of convention into lives that are fantastic and heartbreakingly real. Whether writing about the dilemma of a two-headed man who attempts to expunge his own pain or the shock of a woman who discovers she has married a transsexual, Gowdy convinces us with incisive detail, only to disarm us with black humor.

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.