Showing results by narrator "JIm Meskimen" in All Categories

When it comes to big dreams and schemes, young Chuck Lambert would give Walter Mitty a run for his money. In fact, Chuck’s biggest dream of all is really out of this world. Because he’s got his eyes on a prize in the sky. Chuck wants to buy a planet of his own.... Madman Murphy, the King of Planetary Realtors, is more than happy to oblige. He’s got a whole galaxy of planets for sale. All Chuck needs is money . . . and a lot of it. Eleven years later, saving every penny he can scrape up, Chuck’s dream comes true. He takes possession and takes off for Planet 19453X...

In the world of speculative fiction… Your favorite authors… Have selected best new voices of the year.

Richard Brautigan was an original - brilliant and wickedly funny. His books resonated with the 1960s, making him an overnight counterculture hero. Dark, funny, and exquisitely haunting, his final book-length fiction explores the fragile, mysterious shadowland surrounding death. Told with classic Brautigan wit, poetic style, and mordant irony, An Unfortunate Woman assumes the form of a peripatetic journal chronicling the protagonist's travels and oblique ruminations on the suicide of one woman and the death of a close friend from cancer.

Your grocery bill has jumped 40% in the last decade. Your paycheck buys less every month. You work harder, earn more, and still seem to fall further behind. You've probably wondered — is this just the way things are? Is anyone actually in charge of this? And if so, why isn't anyone fixing it? The answers are hiding in plain sight, inside the banking system most of us were never taught to understand.

There’s not a dare Smoke Burnham won’t take, and there’s not a wager he won’t make. Now he’s betting his life that he can fly his plane, Super Comet - with his pet cheetah Patty coming along for the ride - across the mountains and jungles of South America to a prize-winning payday. All he has to do is out-race the competition, out-maneuver a saboteur, and make out with his girl - who’s determined to bring him down to earth. One thing you can count on - in the air, in a fight, or in his girlfriend’s arms - he’s a man who likes to turn up the heat.

Here is a stunning and provocative guide to the future of international relations—a system for managing global problems beyond the stalemates of business versus government, East versus West, rich versus poor, democracy versus authoritarianism, free markets versus state capitalism. Written by...

ch novelist de Moor (Duke of Egypt) traces narrative arabesques around the terrible romantic jealousy suffered by a blind music critic in this spare, delicate novel. In a series of chance encounters at European airports over the years, the musicologist narrator meets the famous blind patrician music critic, Marius van Vlooten, and extracts his history of tortured love. The first encounter elicits the desperate tale of unrequited love that drove Marius, as a student years before, to shoot himself in the head, thus blinding himself.

Luna Martin, the moll of a well-known Los Angeles gangster nicknamed "Fingers" (because he likes to cut them off), has demanded dance lessons from Hollywood's finest hoofer - and whatever Luna wants, Luna gets. To sidestep the flirtations of the lead-footed lady, Astaire hires private investigator Toby Peters to pose as a dance instructor and take over the lessons. But when someone cuts in and cuts Luna's throat, the grieving gangster makes Peters an offer he can't refuse: Find the killer - or go from having two left feet to one foot in the grave.

Soon to be an animated show on HBO Max! It's SQUISH—a hilarious, action packed graphic novel series, now adapted for audio, from the award-winning creators of Babymouse! Filled with superheroes, comics within comics, and gross-out science, Squish is perfect for fans of Dog Man, Captain...

For all the near-fanatic attention brought each year to the Academy Awards, the organization that dispenses those awards—the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—has yet to be understood. To date, no one has ever produced a thorough account of the Academy’s birth and its awkward adolescence, and the few reports on those periods from outside have always had a glancing, cursory quality. Yet the story of the Academy’s creation and development is a critical piece of Hollywood’s history. Now that story is finally being told.

Harvey Kurtzman created Mad, and Mad revolutionized humor in America. Kurtzman was the original editor, artist, and sole writer of Mad, one of the greatest publishing successes of the twentieth century. But how did Kurtzman invent Mad, and why did he leave it shortly after it burst, nova-like, onto the American scene? For this heavily researched biography, Bill Schelly conducted new interviews with Kurtzman’s colleagues, friends, and family, including Hugh Hefner, R. Crumb, Jack Davis, and many others, and examined Kurtzman’s personal archives.

Lynn Taylor and his kid brother Frank may not be angels, but they’re not devils, either. They’re just a couple of men - two-fisted Texans who have landed on the wrong side of a corrupt lawman. Young Frank’s been framed for robbery, rustling, and murder, and if Lynn doesn’t think fast, his brother’s going to end up the guest of dishonor at a hanging party. Lynn cooks up a daring plan to clear his brother’s name and rope in the real outlaw.

Soon to be an animated show on HBO Max! Squish #1: Super Amoeba It's SQUISH—a graphic novel series, now adapted for audio, about a comic book-loving, twinkie-eating grade school AMOEBA trying to find his place in the world (or at least trying to make it through a school day). Inspired by his...

Tom Christian is on the trail of revenge and a fortune in gold. Square-jawed and rugged, Tom is headed deep into the jungles of the Solomon Islands to find Punjo Charlie—the ruthless criminal who killed his partner. But these jungles are thick with danger ... as greed, temptation and sudden violence threaten to draw Tom into the heart of darkness. There’s a pile of gold.... There’s a beautiful blonde.... And there’s a bloodthirsty tribe of headhunters who have fallen under the spell of Punjo Charlie. The trap has been set.

Every man walks with a shadow...but what happens when he acquires a second one? Just ask Brazos, a cold-blooded killer for hire with blood on his hands and a posse on his tail. Desperate for cash, Brazos accepts $200 to gun down a local man named Brant. He’ll earn every penny...but in the end there’ll be the devil to pay. Because to put a bullet in Brant means putting one in his partner as well - an eerie stranger schooled in the black art of witchcraft. This is one killing that brings with it a deadly curse - and a second shadow.

Farmer Eben Smith heads off to the big city to trade his wagonload of produce. But he barters a lot more than goods after he stumbles across a strange crossroads in time, bargains with different cultures in alternate realities, and accidentally wreaks havoc and chaos in each.

Far in the future exist two Earth empires, separated by a weapon-projected wall of space and poised for war. And George Marquis Lorrilard, a sometime lieutenant in the United Continents Space Navy (that pitiful handful of space guards) and now a space exploiter supposedly driven by greed, must change the fate of Earth and the stars.

This stunning anthology of classic colonial suspense fiction plunges deep into the native soil from which American horror literature first sprang. While European writers of the Gothic and bizarre evoked ruined castles and crumbling abbeys, their American counterparts looked back to the colonial era’s stifling religion, and its dark and threatening woods.

“Adventure,” L. Ron Hubbard said, “I well know, is in the heart, not in the view.” In his stories, which were uniquely drawn from true-to-life experiences, including then-rare voyages to Asia and the South Pacific, he adventured grandly, carrying readers into the cold, storm-swept sea, or the heat of a vast desert or the wild currents of the air. A member of the famed Explorers Club, Mr. Hubbard delivered in these stories a sharp jolt of reality with a healthy dose of pulse-pounding bold adventure.

A blind obsession. A driving ambition. A relentless, unrestrained, single-minded pursuit of a shiny metal. These are the symptoms of a condition known as gold fever, and, like Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, American mining engineer Captain Humbert Reynolds has got it bad. Possible side effects include: temporary insanity, a propensity for violence, and death.