Showing results by narrator "Bronson Pinchot" in All Categories

The title work in this collection of ten short stories and poems is widely regarded as the most famous of Edgar Allan Poe’s writings. This unsettling tale in verse tells of a man’s slow descent into madness as he mourns the loss of his lover. The mysterious visit of a talking raven that utters only one word sparks the man’s steady decline.

Llama loves cooking...and baking...and, above all, eating. For breakfast, Llama makes one epic spread...as well as a big mess. But Llama hates cleaning. So by lunch, Llama has cooked up something really devious - an idea - and by second lunch, Llama has cloned his most fastidious friend, Alpaca, to clean his house. And Llama doesn't stop at just one clone. By dinner, the alpaca clones threaten to tidy the world into utter destruction - the Alpacalypse is here!

One day in November 1994, Lawrence Levy received a phone call out of the blue from Steve Jobs, whom he'd never met, offering him a job running Pixar, a little-known company that had already lost Jobs $50 million. With Pixar's prospects looking bleak, it was with some trepidation that Levy accepted the position. After a few weeks he discovered that the situation was even worse than he'd imagined.

The Expanse meets The Godfather in the third volume of The SynCorp Saga: Empire Earth, a series of space opera/noir thrillers about corporate greed, rebellion, and mankind’s survival among the stars. The final battle for SynCorp’s survival comes home to where it all began: Earth. SynCorp and the SSR prepare for a bloody engagement above Earth, mankind's birthplace and the seat of the largest corporate empire in history. Who will live? Who will die? What fate awaits humanity when the dust of battle clears?

One day Arthur Friedland piles his three sons into the car and drives them to see the Great Lindemann, Master of Hypnosis. Protesting that he doesn't believe in magic even as he is led onto the stage, Arthur nevertheless experiences something. Later that night, while his family sleeps, he takes his passport, empties all the money from his bank account, and vanishes. In time, still absent from his family, he begins to publish novels and becomes an internationally renowned author.

Two families came together in the waiting room of a Denver hospital on May 11, 2004, to await kidney transplants for loved ones. In the first operation, Gregg Farber, 32, a real estate executive, donated a kidney to his father, Steve, a 60-year-old Denver lawyer and power broker. In the second, Guatemalan refugee and landscaper Ernesto Delaroca, also 32, donated a kidney to his sister Sandra, 19, a restaurant worker.

The Tracking of a Russian Spy exhibits the harrowing consequences that can emerge when love, or something like it, intersects with modern-day espionage. Swenson details the perplexing set of events that follow his encounter with a beautiful stranger in a dusky New York City nightclub. The woman in question is Katya and as the two grow closer Swenson wonders whether there might be more to this woman than she lets on.

Written in the irreverent style that made How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read a critical and commercial success, Pierre Bayard takes listeners on a trip around the world, giving us essential guidance on how to talk about all those fantastic places we've never been. Practical, funny, and thought provoking, How to Talk About Places You've Never Been will delight and inform armchair globetrotters and jet-setters, all while never having to leave the comfort of the living room.

In the near future, America is crumbling, bankrupt, and teetering on the edge of chaos. Following the Great Bailout, the multinational Lee-Pi corporation is the only institution that can hold the country together, providing basic services, security, and order. Leonard Cheung is Lee-Pi's most reliable field operative: a negotiator, assassin, and clean-up expert who does the behind-the-scenes dirty work to keep the corporation running.

The setting is Seattle's Lake City neighborhood during the 2001 holiday season. In the wake of the 9/11 tragedy and at the peak of Seattle's first wave of tech-boom gentrification - a wave that never quite made it to his neighborhood - Lane Bueche schemes how to win back his wife (and her trust fund). In his childhood bedroom in his mother's decrepit old house, the idealistic but self-serving striver Lane licks his wounds and hatches a plot.

This wildly entertaining account of the golden age of the action movie charts Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s carnage-packed journey from enmity to friendship against the backdrop of Reagan’s America and the Cold War. Revealing fascinating untold stories of the colourful characters who ascended in their wake, it tells the story of how the era of the invincible action hero who used muscle, martial arts or the perfect weapon to save the day began to fade.

On a small island in a glacier-fed lake on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, Gary and Irene’s marriage is unraveling. Alone now that the children are grown, Gary, driven by 30 years of diverted plans, is determined to build from scratch the cabin he has always wanted, believing it will recapture what once drew him to Alaska. Irene knows better. She suspects that the cabin is Gary’s first step to leaving her.

"Chico", a story by Robert McCammon, was first published in his short fiction collection Blue World.

In 1953, Esref Armagan was born completely blind to a poor family in Istanbul, Turkey. He received no formal education, and spent his childhood days in his father's shop where he developed the curiosity to create and draw. He experienced the world through touch, and learned to visually reproduce his surroundings, including color, shadows, and perspective, with his hands. The blind artist's story will be an inspiration to young artists of all abilities.

The year is 1973, and Alan Eastman, a public intellectual, accidental cultural critic, washed-up war journalist, husband, and philanderer finds himself alone on the floor of his study in an existential crisis. His wife has taken their kids and left him to live with her mother in New Jersey, and his best work feels as though it is years behind him. In the depths of despair, he receives an unexpected and unwelcome phone call from his old rival, offering him the chance to go to Vietnam to write the definitive account of the end of America's longest war.

Back in the Eighties, Mickey DeFalco was America's teenage heartthrob with spiky gelled hair, slanted sideburns, and a number-one hit single - "Sweet Days" - a sappy love song he wrote after his high school sweetheart, Lynn Mahoney, broke his heart. Now approaching middle age, Mickey is lucky to land a singing gig at a bar mitzvah. So the one-hit wonder-boy is making a different kind of comeback - returning to his old stomping grounds in Queens, living with his parents, and sleeping in his childhood bed. Just like in high school.

Evan Michaels struggles with being different, with having the complete memories of two other people who lived sequentially before him. He fights loneliness and believes his ‘condition’ is unique, until he meets Poppy. She recognises his struggle because she has the same ‘condition’, except that she is much older, remembering back seven consecutive lives. But there is something else she must share with Evan - she is a member of a secret society of others like them. They are, in effect, near immortals.

Timi, a boy in Uzbekistan, navigates a strange world of camel breeding, half-understood Islamic doctrine, Mexican soap operas dubbed into Uzbek, and the legacy of widespread pollution from the Soviet era, all while dreaming of doing death-defying stunts on his rickety motorcycle. Lonely and accident-prone, Timi befriends an American humanitarian worker in a struggling marriage, tries to avoid his father's frequent rages, and plans out the astonishing motorcycle jump that will give meaning to his life.

At the turn of the 20th century, as the oppression of Russia's imperial rule takes its toll on Finland, the three Koski siblings - Ilmari, Matti and the politicized young Aino - are forced to flee. They settle among a community of Finns in Deep River - a town on the western edges of the United States. The brothers face the excitement and danger of pioneering this frontier wilderness. But while they are climbing and felling trees 100 metres high, Aino is organising the country's fledgling labour movements.

Funny Business is based around the theme of - what else - humor, and if you’re familiar with Jon and Guys Read, you already know what you’re in store for: an hilarious story.