Showing results by narrator "Jim Meskimen" in All Categories

Open the Writers of the Future and be carried away by stories—and illustrations—that will make you think, make you laugh, and make you see the world in ways you never imagined. Twelve captivating tales from the best new writers of the year as selected by Writers of the Future Contest judges accompanied by three more from L. Ron Hubbard, Nancy Kress, S.M. Stirling.

The electricity has flickered out. The automobile age is over. In Union Grove, a little town in upstate New York, the future is nothing like people thought it would be. Life is hard and close to the bone. Transportation is slow and dangerous, so food is grown locally at great expense of time and energy, and the outside world is largely unknown. There may be a president, and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people aren’t sure.

Masters of language can turn unassuming words into phrases that are beautiful, effective, and memorable. What are the secrets of this alchemy? Part of the answer lies in rhetorical figures: practical ways of applying great aesthetic principles to a simple sentence or paragraph. Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric recovers this knowledge for our times. It amounts to a tutorial on eloquence conducted by Churchill and Lincoln, Dickens and Melville, Burke and Paine, and more than a hundred others.

Retired to a small Colorado mountain town, former Denver homicide detective Woodrow “Mountain” Bell yearns only to fade away. He has failed in so many ways—as a father, a husband, friend, and cop—he fears he wasted his chance at a meaningful life. When Bell stumbles across a long-forgotten, unsolved child murder, his first impulse is to let it lie—but he can’t. He is drawn into the macabre mystery when he realizes the killer might still be near.

In the sequel to his best-selling World Made by Hand, James Howard Kunstler expands on his vision of a post-oil society with a new novel about an America in which the electricity has flickered off, the Internet is a distant memory, and the government is little more than a rumor. In the tiny hamlet of Union Grove, New York, travel is horse-drawn and farming is back at the center of life. But it’s no pastoral haven.

Boldly go to times where no one has gone before. While transporting a contraband Russian time machine and developmental weaponry, Private Everett Dumphee finds himself cast into new settings when the device suddenly activates. What follows are fantastic high-tech experiences that might be called the ultimate off-road adventure. For the determined Dumphee - narrowly escaping with his life and three beautiful women - it is not necessarily a matter of will he make his destination, but when.

The word medieval conjures images of the “Dark Ages”. But the myth of darkness obscures the truth; this was a remarkable period in human history. The Bright Ages recasts the European Middle Ages for what it was, capturing this 1,000-year era in all its complexity and fundamental humanity, bringing to light both its beauty and its horrors. The Bright Ages takes us through 10 centuries and crisscrosses Europe and the Mediterranean, Asia, and Africa, revisiting familiar people and events with new light cast upon them.

The body of a young woman found in an Arizona border town walks out of the morgue. To the CDC investigator called in to consult the local police, it's a bizarre medical mystery. More bodies, dead of a mysterious disease that solidifies their blood, begin disappearing from morgues nearby. In a futile game of catch-up, the CDC, the FBI and the US government realise that it's already too late to stop it: the vampire epidemic will sweep first the United States and then the world. 

This collection shows a vibrant young writer with a wide-ranging imagination, ferocious creative energy, devastating wit, and an eye for the wonderful and terrifying and tragic. Among the gems are "All the Sounds of Fear", "The Sky Is Burning", "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman", and "In Lonely Lands". Though they stand tall on their own merits, they also point the way to the sublime stories that followed soon after and continue to come even now, more than 50 years later.

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.

Nina Siegal, an accomplished journalist and novelist, weaves together excerpts from the daily journals of collaborators, resistors, and the persecuted—a Dutch Nazi police detective, a Jewish journalist imprisoned at Westerbork transit camp, a grocery store owner who saved dozens of lives—into a braided nonfictional narrative of the Nazi occupation and the Dutch Holocaust, as individuals experienced it day by day.

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.

This anthology, with an introduction by Robert Silverberg, offers a sweeping survey of robots as depicted throughout literature. Since the Iliad—in which we are shown golden statues built by Hephaestus “with minds and wisdoms”—humans have been fascinated by the idea of artificial life. From the Argonautica to the medieval Jewish legend of the Golem and Ambrose Bierce’s tale of a chess-playing robot, the idea of what robots are—and who creates them—can be drastically different.

California, 1957. Lee Mellon believes he is the descendant of the only Confederate general to have come from Big Sur and is himself a seeker of truth in his own modern-day war against the status quo. For the first time in audio, A Confederate General from Big Sur was the late Richard Brautigan's first published novel, written when he was 28.

This is the story of silver's transformation from soft money during the 19th century to hard asset today, and how manipulations of the white metal by American president Franklin D. Roosevelt during the 1930s and by the richest man in the world, Texas oil baron Nelson Bunker Hunt, during the 1970s altered the course of American and world history. FDR pumped up the price of silver to help jump start the US economy during the Great Depression, but this move weakened China, which was then on the silver standard, and facilitated Japan's rise to power before World War II.

In this forceful manifesto, Hirsch argues that children in the US are being deprived of the basic knowledge that would enable them to function in contemporary society. Includes 5,000 essential facts to know. 

Benedict XVI: A Life offers insight into the young life and rise through the Church’s ranks of a man who would become a hero and a lightning rod for Catholics the world over. Based on countless hours of interviews in Rome with Benedict himself, this two-volume biography is the definitive record of the life of Joseph Ratzinger and the legacy of Pope Benedict XVI. This first volume follows his early life, from his days growing up in Germany and his conscription into the Hitler Youth during WWII to his career as an academic theologian and eventual archbishop of Munich.

The 1964 murder of a nationally known cancer researcher sets the stage for this gripping exposé of medical professionals enmeshed in covert government operations over the course of three decades. Following a trail of police records, FBI files, cancer statistics, and medical journals, this revealing book presents evidence of a web of medical secret-keeping that began with the handling of evidence in the JFK assassination and continued apace....

Remy is a rat who enjoys the finer things in life, and when a happy accident lands him in the kitchen of a Parisian restaurant, he can't resist helping a hapless cook create culinary masterpieces that have all of Paris waiting in line for a taste. 

One misty evening, Jennings Michael Burch's mother, too sick to care for him, left her eight-year-old son at an orphanage with the words, "I'll be right back." She wasn't.... Shuttled through a bleak series of foster homes, orphanages, and institutions, Jennings never remained in any of them long enough to make a friend. Instead, he clung to a tattered stuffed animal named Doggie, his sole source of comfort in a frightening world. Here, in his own words, Jennings Michael Burch reveals the abuse and neglect he experienced during his lost childhood.