Showing results by narrator "Christopher Lane" in All Categories

" Transparent Things revolves around the four visits of the hero - sullen, gawky Hugh Person - to Switzerland.... As a young publisher, Hugh is sent to interview R., falls in love with Armande on the way, wrests her, after multiple humiliations, from a grinning Scandinavian and returns to NY with his bride.... Eight years later - following a murder, a period of madness and a brief imprisonment - Hugh makes a lone sentimental journey to wheedle out his past...." (Martin Amis)

As America's foremost public intellectual, Norman Mailer was a ubiquitous presence in our national life - on the airwaves and in print - for more than sixty years. With his supple mind and pugnacious persona, he engaged society more than any other writer of his generation. The trademark Mailer swagger is much in evidence in these pages as he holds forth on culture, ideology, politics, sex, gender, and celebrity, among other topics.

The Coming Insurrection is an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe. Written by the anonymous Invisible Committee in the vein of Guy Debord — and with comparable elegance — it has been proclaimed a manual for terrorism by the French government (who recently arrested its alleged authors).

More than 2,000 men, women, and children are on board. Here on the first-class promenade is millionaire John Jacob Astor, who hopes his return from Egypt with his pregnant teen bride will invite a minimum of media attention. And here, in the third-class common room, a beautiful Lebanese refugee, on her way to family in Florida, discovers first love. And there in the distance, shrouded in darkness, an ancient iceberg lies patient, awaiting its encounter.

The Enchanter is the Ur-Lolita, the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls, whose coltish grace and subconscious coquetry reveal, to his mind, a special bud on the verge of bloom.

With a storm paralyzing New England, the O'Boyle household becomes prey to a pair of brutal escaped killers desperate to find refuge. Skyler O'Boyle is convinced the only way they can live through the night is by playing a daring psychological game to throw the convicts off their guard. Her one hope for rescue is that the men are unaware that her daughter, Kat, has escaped into the blizzard.

When Tammy Gleason received a frantic phone call from her father, that was all it took to put her on the road home to Fort Bragg from Memphis, Tennessee, trying to outrun a disaster. On her way out of town, she befriends a young man whose only name is Ringo and who just might be a little bit more than he seems.

A group of people evacuating ahead of civil unrest amid a societal collapse find themselves lost, alone, and on the run, deep in the woods of rural West Tennessee. With snow on the ground, no skills, and not much more than the clothes on their backs, the group is in dire straits and probably won't last the coming night. Until out of the falling snow, a lone figure approaches. Over the next few days their silent benefactor will keep them safe, fed, and warm while helping them acquire the know-how to care for themselves. The thing is, he's just a kid....

Piet Hoffmann is the best undercover operative in the Swedish police force, but only one other man is even aware of his existence. When a drug deal he is involved in goes badly wrong, he must face the hardest mission of his life – infiltrating Sweden’s most infamous maximum-security prison.Detective Inspector Ewert Grens is charged with investigating the drug-related killing. Unaware of Hoffman’s real identity, he believes himself to be on the trail of a dangerous psychopath.

Corporate auditor Sam Keller, careful to a fault, has decided to live it up for a change. And what better spot for business-class hedonism than the boomtown of Dubai, where resort islands materialize from open ocean, fortunes are made overnight, and skiers crisscross the snowy slopes of a shopping mall. But when a colleague is murdered during a night on the town, Sam soon finds himself waist-deep in a bewildering, lethal mix of mobsters, prostitutes, and crooked cops.

July 1864. Union officer Nathan Parker has been imprisoned at nightmarish Andersonville prison camp in Georgia along with his soldiers. As others die around them, Nathan and his men hatch a daring plan to allow him to escape through a tunnel and make his way to Vicksburg, where he intends to alert his superiors to the imprisonment and push for military action.

When CEOs think about the supply chain, it's usually to cut costs. But the smartest leaders see supply chain and sourcing for what they can be: hidden tools for outperforming the competition. Steve Jobs, upon returning to Apple in 1997, focused on transforming the supply chain. He hired Tim Cook - and the company sped up the development of new products, getting them into consumers' hands faster. The rest is history.

It’s ten years before the time of Charles Dickens’s novels, and the wild Miss Havisham is bent on revenge against the swindler who left her at the altar on her wedding day in Great Expectations. But it won’t be as simple as she hopes.

Harmony House is more than a “special place for special people.” It’s a think tank where high-functioning autistic savants harness their unique abilities for the benefit of society. Resident Eddie Parks’s contribution: an “echo box” that can re-create never-recorded sounds using acoustic archeology. All Eddie wants is to hear his late mother’s voice. But what he’s created is inadvertently posing a threat to national security. To Harmony House’s shadowy government backers and radical extremists, the echo box is the ultimate intelligence asset - an end to the very concept of secrecy.

A collection of classic Western tales including Tappan's Burro by Zane Grey, Jargan M by Max Brand and The Trail to Crazy Man by Louis L'Amour.

On the 85th floor of a glittering high-rise in Los Angeles, Robert Tarza steps into the lobby of the Marbury Marfan law firm to discover his partner Simon Rafer lying in a pool of blood - an ornate dagger plunged into his back. Robert had worked with Simon for decades, and their relationship was fraught with conflict. But he never imagined he would wind up as the prime suspect for his colleague’s murder. As the evidence stacks up against him with frightening speed, he quickly falls from his respected position to that of a criminal dragged through the tabloids.

At a time of astonishing confusion about what it means to be a man, Brad Miner has recovered the oldest and best ideal of manhood: the gentleman. Reviving a thousand-year tradition of chivalry, honor, and heroism, The Compleat Gentleman provides the essential model for 21st-century masculinity.

P. J. O'Rourke, 'the funniest writer in America', harbours a guilty pleasure – ever since growing up the son of a car dealer in Ohio, he has been crazy about cars. In Driving Like Crazy, he reveals in his love for all things vehicular. From a thousand-mile expedition across Mexico to a trek through Kyrgyzstan in the back of the Soviet army surplus truck; from an alcohol-fuelled weekend in North Carolina to an eventful journey from Islamabad to Calcutta.

After going on the run—for what he knows and has created—autistic Eddie Parks is back in Harmony House, the think tank that has been his sanctuary for sixteen years. With his miraculous invention, an “echo box” that excavates sounds from the past, Eddie achieved the only thing he wanted: to hear his late mother sing. For Bob Stenson, leader of the American Heritage Foundation, whoever controls the echo box controls the future. To seize the device, he has to get Eddie where he’s most vulnerable: by kidnapping Dr. Skylar Drummond, the only person in the world Eddie trusts.

This candid and darkly witty memoir recounts an exhilarating life - and a few close brushes with death. With remarkable sangfroid and a humorist's eye for absurdity, H. K. Roy describes his many strange and risky exploits in his long career with the CIA. Whether he was pursuing Soviet and Cuban spies, running "denied area" operations in Eastern Europe, hunting Bosnian War criminals, or providing actionable intelligence to US government and coalition forces in Iraq, Roy usually found himself at the right place at the right time.