Showing results by narrator "Kevin Collins" in All Categories

In a world where magic, technology, and nature have merged, the few who can control Runes hold dominance over all of creation. All believe that Aleksi, a 16-year-old orphan, was blessed to be born with a Rune embedded in his palm, but that's only because they don't know the truth - Aleksi's Rune is so powerful it's killing him.

A city equal parts darkness and hope. A scarred city. An often violent one. But a resilient city, too. That's our Memphis. Like many cities we have a namesake - in Egypt, Men-nefer became Menfe became Memphis, enduring and beautiful, on the banks of the Nile. Centuries later, another continent, another people, another river: Memphis, Tennessee, the soul of the Mississippi Delta, was formed.

San Francisco Bay Area archaeologist Davis Lowry has everything - success, a fascinating profession - but he is troubled by a bout of sleepwalking. For a change of scenery, he travels to York, England, where a bog man has been unearthed. A series of macabre accidents plague the site, and Davis finds himself enmeshed in a modern-day horror with roots in the bloody past.

The friendship between the Coleman and Shepherd families is as old and comfortable as the neighboring houses they occupy each summer on Cape Cod. Samuel and Sarah Coleman love those warm months by the water; the evenings spent on their porch, enjoying gin and tonics, good conversation and homemade clam chowder. Here they’ve watched their sons, Isaac and Asa, grow into fine young men, and watched, too, as Nate Shepherd, aching with grief at the loss of his first wife, finally found love again with the much younger Noelle.

Jacob is a soldier in a war against a new type of enemy. Trained in the basics of ground combat and tossed a weapon, he is now on the front lines of the global conflict. He must face the Delta Horde or risk his family's eviction to the refugee camps. Inexperienced, Jacob discovers he has something far more valuable than weapons and armor: his fellow soldiers at his side. As a team they struggle to survive battles and an enemy that would ruin a man standing against them alone.

In his first nine years as a teacher, Brendan Halpin goes from wide-eyed idealist to cynical, heartbroken idealist. Unique among teaching memoirs, Losing My Faculties is not the story of a heroic teacher who transforms the lives of his hardbitten students; rather, it's the inspirational and often unpretty truth about people who choose to get up ridiculously early day after day and year after year to go stand in front of teenagers.

When Ryder Montgomery shows up on her doorstep 10 years after breaking her heart, Casey can't decide which burns hotter - her desire to be with him or the pain he left her with....

All work and no play...would make Jason Montgomery a very happy man. Ever since his brother had married a woman who worked for their company, Jason has been walking around fending off the unwanted advances of all of the single women in his employ. Now, with a make-or-break business expansion in the works, Jason needs an assistant he can trust not to mix business with romance.

Mac Montgomery spent two years watching his father play matchmaker for his brothers and their wives, and as the last Montgomery standing, he knew it wouldn't be long until all eyes would be on him. While he couldn't deny that things had worked out well for his siblings, the last thing that Mac wanted was to get married and settle down.

About this story, author James Enge says, "The principal thief in this story is me. I stole the world and characters for 'Thieves at the Gate' from Homer. It's always been interesting to me how people like Odysseus (or Gunnarr Hamundarson or whoever) could be decent, respectable guys at home and murderous pirates abroad. This isn't really the answer, but it's an answer."

In five years, little green men are going to invade Earth - and the only man who knows is Professor Emil Vlasov. Is Vlasov crazy? Or is something actually watching the Earth... waiting...

Fortress is America's guarantor of freedom, an orbiting arsenal of laser weapons and nuclear missiles. It was considered impregnable - until now. Former CIA officer Tom Kelley is sent to learn the secrets surrounding a dead alien found in Turkey and discovers a maze of lies and treachery that could transform America's shield into an engine of global terror.

After a stint living and working in Korea, Nebraska native Bart Schaneman sets out on a quest to live deliberately and with strength and purpose before returning to the States and figuring out what to do with his life and his writing. The only constant, his copy of The Idiot, Bart meets many eclectic characters along the way, themselves young travelers like him, and together they share adventures and experiences against the breathtaking backdrops of China, Mongolia and Russia.

Forced to come to grips with his understanding of the past - and its implications for the present - Roberts deftly moves between "then" and "now," ignorance and understanding, in honest, confessional prose that places the reader front and center for a true story that, indeed, is far stranger than fiction. Obsessive in nature and elliptical in structure, Roberts' story ultimately inhabits the liminal space between truth and appearances, love and danger, the hunter and the hunted.

Eleven writers largely unknown outside Cuba depict a world that veers from a hyper-real Havana in decay, against a backdrop of oblivious drug-toting German tourists, to a fantasy land (or is it?) where vigilant Cubans bar the door to zombies masquerading as health inspectors. Sex and knife-fights, stutterers and addicts, losers and lost literary classics: welcome to a raw and genuine island universe closed to casual visitors.

As a student named Rick Starr experiences elementary school, middle school, and high school, he learns more about gender roles, psychological isolation, bullying, and apathy than about reading, writing, and arithmetic. After suffering through bad teachers, navigating the social ladder, confronting bullies, and completing countless standardized tests, he has a revelation about public school in America: It's comprised of sex, lies, and scantrons.

Dodging secret police on the daily, and haggling prices for dried fruit and vintage leathers in heroin-laced bazaars, My Kazakhy is filled with all the gems you wouldn't expect to find from a queer Latino boy serving in the Peace Corps in a third world, Muslim country.

The most civilized and 'decent' among us find that we are complicit with the most brutal murderers. We enter into literally unspeakable alliances - of which we dare not speak except through the obliquities and indirections of fiction, poetry, and visual art of the sort gathered here in New Jersey Noir.

From the introduction to Philadelphia Noir: "America's first great city, first capital, and first industrial metropolis contained from the beginning the mix of poor workers and elite culture, of ethnic enclaves and religious intolerance, of easy skullduggery and flesh-pot possibilities, that led Lincoln Steffens in 1903 to famously rule it 'corrupt and contented'."

San Francisco Noir lashes out with hard-biting tales exploring the shadowy nether regions of scenic "Baghdad by the Bay". In this superb collection, virtuosos of the genre meet up with the best of SF’s literary fiction community to chart a unique psycho-geography for a dark landscape. From inner city boroughs to the outlands, each contributor offers an original story based in a distinct neighborhood.