Showing results by narrator "Mirron Willis" in All Categories

In Mississippi Noir, literary crime fiction master Tom Franklin has assembled a phenomenal short-story collection that highlights a mesmerizing and diverse set of styles and subject matter. Urban, suburban, and rural settings alike unveil new shades of darkness that fall upon Mississippi's past and present.

Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. In the wake of Chicago Noir, Twin Cities Noir, and Kansas City Noir - all popular volumes in the Akashic Noir Series - comes the latest Midwest installment, St. Louis Noir. Masterfully curated by Scott Phillips, author of The Ice Harvest (adapted for film, starring John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton), this volume will chill the listener with heartland menace.

Buffalo Bill Cody, Bat Masterson, and other legendary heroic figures of America's Old West get the royal treatment in White Hats, a collection of stories by esteemed Western authors. This anthology is expertly compiled by Robert J. Randisi, who has gathered extraordinary stories of those who wear the white hat from well-known authors like John Jakes, Richard S. Wheeler, James Reasoner, and others.

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.

Buffalo, New York, is still the second-largest metropolis in the state, but in recent years its designation as the Queen City has been elbowed aside by a name that's pure noir: The City of No Illusions. Presidents came from here; and in 1901 a president was killed here while visiting the Pan-American Exposition, by a man who checked into a hotel under a name that translates as Nobody.

In Dig Deep, J.C. Watts offers seven powerful maxims that have kept him grounded throughout his roller-coaster career from star college quarterback to U.S. Congressman. The first black Republican ever elected to a leadership position in Congress, Watts resisted the rat-race of Washington and eventually declined re-election. His seven simple principles are a blueprint for living a fulfilling and meaningful life without falling to the temptations of reckless ambition or indulgence.

How can Leonid McGill say no to the beautiful young woman who walks into his office with a stack of cash? She's an artist, she tells him, who's escaped from poverty via marriage to a rich collector who keeps her on a stipend. But she says she fears for her life, and needs Leonid's help. Though Leonid knows better than to believe every word, this isn't a job he can afford to turn away, even as he senses that - if his family's misadventures don't kill him first - sorting out the woman's crooked tale will bring him straight to death's door.

Leonid McGill-the protagonist introduced in The Long Fall, the book that returned Walter Mosley to bestseller lists nationwide - is still fighting to stick to his reformed ways while the world around him pulls him in every other direction. He has split up with his girlfriend, Aura, because his new self won't let him leave his wife - but then Aura's new boyfriend starts angling to get Leonid kicked out of his prime, top-of-the­skyscraper office space.

A Pandora's box opens when reporter Andy Carmichael, too light skinned for acceptance by blacks and too dark skinned for acceptance by whites, is sent to Georgia to interview Miss Penbrook, an icon of Southern literature. From her deathbed, the mysterious Miss Penbrook gives Andy journals that reveal a surprising twist - her story and his own meld into one.

In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of America's most beloved sporting event - the Super Bowl - an authoritative collection of the most pivotal plays through the decades, compiled by the legendary Jerry Rice.

Following the Civil War, Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, thrived as a cauldron of sex and song, violence and passion. But out of this turmoil emerged a center of black progress, optimism, and cultural ferment. Preston Lauterbach tells this vivid, fascinating story through the multigenerational saga of a family whose ambition, race pride, and moral complexity indelibly shaped the city that would loom so large in American life.

The general public has never heard of Jack O'Dell. But many of those who worked with him in the '50s and '60s consider him the unsung hero of the Black Freedom Movement. Victor Navasky, the longtime editor of The Nation and author of the acclaimed book Kennedy Justice, drawing on secret government files and interviews with O'Dell himself, seeks to correct that historical oversight.

Asylum Denied is the gripping story of political refugee David Ngaruri Kenney's harrowing odyssey through the world of immigration processing in the United States. Kenney, while living in his native Kenya, led a boycott to protest his government's treatment of his fellow farmers. He was subsequently arrested and taken into the forest to be executed. This audiobook, told by Kenney and his lawyer Philip G. Schrag from Kenney's own perspective, tells of his near-murder, imprisonment, and torture in Kenya.

Born into slavery in Kentucky, raised on the Western frontier on the farm adjacent to Daniel Boone’s, “rented” out in adolescence to a succession of steamboat captains on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the young man known as “Sandy” reinvented himself as “William Wells” Brown after escaping to freedom. He lifted himself out of illiteracy and soon became an innovative, widely admired, and hugely popular speaker on antislavery circuits (both American and British) and went on to write the earliest African American works in a plethora of genres....

Denise Hamilton writes the Eve Diamond series. Her books have been shortlisted for the Edgar, Macavity, Anthony, and Willa Cather awards. The Los Angeles Times named Last Lullaby a Best Book of 2004, and it was also a USA Today Summer Pick and a finalist for a Southern California Booksellers Association 2004 award.

Mystery sensation Pelecanos pens the lead story and edits this groundbreaking collection of stories detailing the seedy underside of the nation's capital. This is not an anthology of ill-conceived and inauthentic political thrillers. Instead, in D.C. Noir, pimps, whores, gangsters, and con-men run rampant in zones of this city that most never hear about.

From "Trench Town" to "Half Way Tree" to "Norbrook" to "Portmore" and beyond, the stories of Kingston Noir shine light into the darkest corners of this fabled city. Joining award-winning Jamaican authors such as Marlon James, Leone Ross, and Thomas Glave are two "special guest" writers with no Jamaican lineage: Nigerian-born Chris Abani and British writer Ian Thomson.

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.

For nearly 15 years NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture has been a leading scholarly journal of baseball history. Covering the cultural and historical implications of America’s national pastime, NINE has explored baseball from the earliest matches and little-known players of the 1800s to the modern billion-dollar industry and its superstars of today. Here, gathered for the first time, are the best essays from NINE that center on the complex and multifaceted topic of African Americans in baseball.

In the first week of the new decade, an emergency phone call shatters Chicago Private Detective Smokey Dalton’s hopes for a good 1970. His adopted son Jimmy and Jimmy’s best friend and cousin Keith Grimshaw need help. Smokey arrives at a South Side hotel across from the boys’ school in time to clean up a horrible mess, one the boys mostly solve on their own. But the boys’ heroic actions echo across all of Chicago. Smokey finds himself standing alone against street gangs, the mob, and the Democratic Machine. If he fights this battle and fails, he stands to lose not only Jimmy and their future together, but also his life.