Showing results by narrator "Jonathan Davis" in All Categories

Welcome to the world of Droll Tales, in which reality is a mutually agreed-upon illusion and life is painful, paradoxical, beautiful, and brief. With an oddball cast of characters who reappear in various guises throughout these interrelated stories, Smyles reveals an off-kilter world overlapping this one. And in giving us a tour of this enchanted, sometimes absurd place, with its own workings and ways of expression, she gives us a new way to understand our own. 

Four "delightfully twisted" scripted stories by Erin Mallon are now available as a bundle.

Ilda talks to people who aren’t there. Tilly hears fingers clawing at her door. All the while, the moon keeps her watchful eyes on them. Come Find Me is a time-hopping, feminist ghost story spanning two time periods. As it weaves its way through the halls of Trenton Psychiatric Hospital in 1907 and a beach house during the tumultuous summer of 1969, we discover the secret-laden lives of three women and how their worlds intertwine.

Zeke Watson has the weight of every world on his shoulders. A mysterious threat endangers all of existence, and he is tasked with rescuing the past, the present, and the future. While he leads a team onto a frozen tundra, Adaliah Bancroft sets out for a gleaming metropolis. Both of them are tasked with the same goal. Two tips of the same spear, at least one of them will fail. But can the other succeed and reapply balance to the universe?

A medieval swindler gets caught with his proverbial pants down; a foolproof plan is put into place to pick up some cash via AI, until things take an unexpected and deadly turn; a legendary bodyguard is hired to protect precious cargo, but who will protect the cargo from him? The 14 brand-new stories deal with the complex idea of morality and will make listeners wonder what side is the right side.

In the 1970s, the behavioral psychologist Herbert S. Terrace led a remarkable experiment to see if a chimpanzee could be taught to use language. A young ape, named “Nim Chimpsky” in a nod to the linguist whose theories Terrace challenged, was raised by a family in New York and instructed in American Sign Language. Initially, Terrace thought that Nim could create sentences but later discovered that Nim’s teachers inadvertently cued his signing. Terrace concluded that Project Nim failed - not because Nim couldn’t create sentences but because he couldn’t even learn words.

Tom Honeyman made his name cracking a horrific double murder in his hometown of Prosper, New York. He got an international best seller out of it, made a small fortune, and left his newspaper reporting days behind. But was it all based on a lie? Now, more than a decade after his only success, Honeyman’s life is in tatters. His wife committed suicide, his daughter hasn’t spoken to him in years, and his books don’t sell. But Tom Honeyman is not alone. An unseen stranger tells Honeyman he got it wrong all those years ago. And he has just four days to uncover the real murderer.

During the summer of 1997, a series of bombings terrorize Havana hotels. The targets are tourists, and the terrorists are exiles seeking to cripple Cuban tourism and kill the revolution. After Mano finds himself helpless to save one of the victims, his nemesis Colonel Emilio Perez of the National Revolutionary Police recruits him into Havana's top-secret Wasp Network of spies for a job that only he can perform - but for reasons he never would have believed or expected. 

Moments after Sen stepped through the revenant arch, an inky darkness flooded out across his world. Over the wreckage of a city broken by revolution it surged, engulfing the grand Grammaton tower, smothering the King's Aigle palace and drowning every last caste in the dark. Sen alone escaped; a young man prophesied to raise the Saint and save his world for good. But he failed. Now his world is gone, and his friends are just memories swallowed by the endless dark. 

From a writer whose work has been praised by Junot Díaz as “Latin American fiction at its pulpy phantasmagorical finest,” Don’t Send Flowers is a riveting novel centered on Carlos Treviño, a retired police detective in northern Mexico who has to go up against the corruption and violence that caused him to leave the force, when he’s hired by a businessman to find his missing daughter. A 17-year-old girl has disappeared after a fight with her boyfriend that was interrupted by armed men, leaving the boyfriend on life support and the girl an apparent kidnapping victim.

Three thousand years ago, the world fell into darkness, when the great black mouth of the Rot ravaged the land. Across the glorious library city of Aradabar, its dark tongues hammered down, leveling the glass towers of learning and entombing the bookyards in a thick blanket of lava. Only a single child survived the devastation: an infant with a prophecy carved into his skin, promising the rise of a hero powerful enough to slay the Rot for good. Now that child is a young man, beginning to question the meaning of his many scars.

Harry Tabor is about to receive the Man of the Decade award. As he enters his twilight years, this distinction seems like the culmination to a life well lived. A perfect life. A life spent helping Jewish refugees from all over the globe find better lives in America, giving them a second chance. Harry knows all about second chances. He has the perfect marriage - his wife, Roma, is an eminent child psychologist, and they tell each other almost everything. His three grown children, Phoebe, Camille, and Simon, are all accomplished. 

Hunger of Memory is the story of Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez, who begins his schooling in Sacramento, California, knowing just 50 words of English, and concludes his university studies in the stately quiet of the reading room of the British Museum. Here is the poignant journey of a "minority student" who pays the cost of his social assimilation and academic success with a painful alienation - from his past, his parents, his culture - and so describes the high price of "making it" in middle-class America.

As a citizen, Nicholas Payne is not in the least solid. As a boyfriend, he is nothing short of disastrous, and his latest flame, the patrician Ann Fitzgerald, has done a wise thing by dropping him. But Ann isn't counting on Nicholas's wild persistence, or on the slapstick lyricism of Thomas McGuane, who in The Bushwhacked Piano sends his hero from Michigan to Montana on a demented mission of courtship, whose highlights include a ride on a homicidal bronco and apprenticeship to the inventor of the world's first highrise for bats. The result is a tour de force of American Dubious.

In 1965, following his mother's death, Infante returns to Cuba from Brussels, where he is employed as a cultural attaché at the Cuban embassy. When a few days later his permission to return to Europe is revoked, Infante begins a period of suspicion, uncertainty, and disillusion. Unable to leave the country, denied access to party officials, yet still receiving checks for his work in Belgium, Infante discovers the reality of Cuba under Fidel Castro.

A powerful banker, gunned down in cold blood. A military family, senselessly slaughtered as they sleep. A four-star general, hacked and framed by virtual assassins. Another key general, kidnapped from his farm near Fort Bragg. Atrocities like these are all too common in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. But this is the United States of America. When Jake Mahegan receives a distress call from General Savage in North Carolina, he rushes to the commander's home - and walks right into an ambush. The terrorists are here...and no one is safe.

Ever wish you could have your very own lightsaber like Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi? Or that you could fly through space at the speed of light like Han Solo and Poe Dameron? Well, those ideas aren't as outlandish as you think. In The Physics of Star Wars, you'll explore the mystical power of the Force using quantum mechanics, find out how much energy it would take for the Death Star or Starkiller Base to destroy a planet, and discover how we can potentially create our very own lightsabers.

On to Petersburg follows the Union army's movement to the James River, the military response from the Confederates, and the initial assault on Petersburg, which Rhea suggests marked the true end of the Overland Campaign. Beginning his account in the immediate aftermath of Grant's three-day attack on Confederate troops at Cold Harbor, Rhea argues that the Union general's primary goal was not - as often supposed - to take Richmond, but rather to destroy Lee's army by closing off its retreat routes and disrupting its supply chain.

Charlie Marsh, a petty thief and con man, becomes a national hero when he rescues the warden of a state penitentiary during a prison riot, but it doesn't take long before he is wanted again, suspected of killing a United States congressman. After 12 years of living in the African nation of Batanga, at the mercy of Jean-Claude Baptiste, a sadistic, power-mad dictator, Charlie flees for home to face his murder charge, when Baptiste learns about Charlie's affair with the tyrant's favorite wife.

George Washington was one of the greatest leaders the world has ever known. He was never afraid to be the first to try something, from exploring the woods around his childhood home to founding a brand new nation, the United States of America. With his faith in the American people and tremendous bravery, he helped win the Revolutionary War and became the country’s first president.