Showing results by narrator "Jefferson Mays" in All Categories

One day, Colonel Fred Johnson will be hailed as a hero to the system. One day, he will meet a desperate man in possession of a stolen spaceship and a deadly secret and extend a hand of friendship. But long before he became the leader of the Outer Planets Alliance, Fred Johnson had a very different name. The Butcher of Anderson Station.

Having travelled back in time to Victorian-era New York City to save her siblings, Constance Greene confronts Manhattan’s most dangerous serial killer, Dr. Leng, but she is betrayed and left incandescent with rage. Agent Pendergast is determined to assist Constance, who is now on a fanatical quest for vengeance. And Diogenes, Pendergast's brother, also takes a trip out of his own time, offering to help the duo for unexplained reasons of his own.

In 1849, 5 years before Henry David Thoreau published Walden, he wrote what has come to be recognized as the philosophic textbook for nonviolent revolution. "I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward," Thoreau wrote. "It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right." Taking as his major premise the idea that "...government is best which governs least," Thoreau asserts that one's first loyalty is to one's own nature.

What happens after the bombs drop? This is the troubling question Philip K. Dick addresses with Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb. It is the story of a world reeling from the effects of nuclear annihilation and fallout, a world where mutated humans and animals are the norm, and the scattered survivors take comfort from a disc jockey endlessly circling the globe in a broken-down satellite. And hidden amongst the survivors is Dr. Bloodmoney himself, the man responsible for it all.

In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized America's imagination. A "spirit photographer", William Mumler took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of a lost loved one alongside the living subject. Mumler was a sensation. Peter Manseau brilliantly captures a nation wracked with grief and hungry for proof of the existence of ghosts and for contact with their dead husbands and sons. It took a circus-like trial of Mumler on fraud charges to expose a fault line of doubt and manipulation.

The darker and more dystopian the future appears, the more influential public writers become. But with so much content vying for our attention, and so much misinformation and propaganda polluting public discourse, how can writers break through the noise to inform an increasingly busy, stressed, and overwhelmed audience? In Tell It Like It Is, bestselling author, writing coach, and teacher Roy Peter Clark offers a succinct and practical guide to writing with clarity, honesty, and conviction.

Jason Taverner has a glittering TV career, millions of fans, great wealth and something close to eternal youth. He is one of a handful of brilliant, beautiful people, the product of top-secret government experiments forty years earlier. But suddenly, all records of him vanish. He becomes a man with no identity, in a police state where everyone us closely monitored. Can he ever be rich and famous again? Or was that life just an illusion?

An action-packed novella from New York Times best-selling science-fiction author James S. A. Corey, set in the world of his Hugo-nominated Expanse series - now a major TV series. Like many before them, Cara and her family ventured through the gates as scientists and researchers, driven to carve out a new life and uncover the endless possibilities of the unexplored alien worlds now within reach. But soon the soldiers followed - and under this new order, Cara makes a discovery that will change everything.

When catastrophic overpopulation threatens Earth, one company offers to teleport citizens to Whale’s Mouth, an allegedly pristine new home for happy and industrious émigrés. But there is one problem: the teleportation machine only works in one direction. When Rachmael ben Applebaum discovers that some of the footage of happy settlers may have been faked, he sets out on an eighteen-year journey to see if anyone wants to come back.

Blending reality and illusion with elegance and precision, the stories in this collection - one of Calvino’s earliest - take place in a World War II era and postwar Italy tinged with the visionary and fablelike qualities that would come to define this master storyteller’s later style. A trio of gluttonous burglars invade a pastry shop; two children trespass upon a forbidden garden; a wealthy family invites a rustic goatherd to lunch, only to mock him.

Joe Haldeman tells the tale of Carmen Dula’s six-year journey through space to the home of The Others, where she represents Earth in hopes of forging a peace accord. But due to Relativity, 50 Earth years have passed since Carmen left. And while humans have been busy constructing an enormous flotilla of warships, The Others possess power and technology far beyond anything Earth can imagine.

The final novella set in the universe of James S. A. Corey's NYT-bestselling Expanse series. Now a Prime Original series. This story will be available in the complete Expanse story collection, Memory's Legion.

A novella set in the universe of James S. A. Corey's New York Times best-selling Expanse series, now a Prime Original series. This story will be available in the complete Expanse story collection, Memory's Legion.

In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the triumph of an American-led democratic order. In Scorched Earth, historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin dispatches the myth of World War II as a good war. Instead, he depicts the conflict as it truly was: a massive battle beset by vicious racial atrocities, fought between rival empires across huge stretches of Asia and Europe.

These intoxicating stories delve down to the core of our senses of taste, hearing, and smell. Amid the flavors of Mexico's fiery chiles and spices, a couple on holiday discovers dark truths about the maturing of desire in the title story, "Under the Jaguar Sun". In "A King Listens", a gripping portrait of a frenzied mind, the menacing echoes in a huge palace spur a tyrant's thoughts to the heights of paranoid intensity. "The Name, the Nose" drives to a startling conclusion as men across time and space pursue the women whose aromas have enchanted them.

Somewhere in the vast expanse of space, a group of prisoners lives in permanent captivity. The only company they have is each other and the Belters who guard them. The only stories they know are the triumphs and crimes that brought them there. The only future they see is an empty life in an enormous room. And then the man from Mars comes along.... Set in the hardscrabble solar system of the Expanse, The Vital Abyss deepens James S. A. Corey's acclaimed series.

Hades, god of the dead, welcomes listeners on a dangerous tour of his underworld kingdom, filled with monsters, furies, giants, and vampire demons. Along the way, he reveals ancient death rites and sinister curses, tells hair-raising stories, and cracks jokes to die for. With his witty voice and ghoulish sense of humor, Hades is the perfect guide through this fresh and imaginative work of nonfiction that unfolds like a novel. Includes a glossary, bibliography, and index.

The Turn of the Screw is a fireside tale of evil and mystery. Filled with extraordinary drama, Henry James' story has been widely popular ever since its publication in 1898. It also inspired a film, a play, and an opera. A governess has been hired to care for two orphaned young children in their uncle's English country home. But soon after she meets the boy and his sister, the governess begins to see fearful apparitions.

FBI Special Agent A.X.L. Pendergast always wants to protect his protegee Constance Greene from harm. But, against all odds, Constance has found a way to travel back in time to New York City in the late 1800s to embark on a dangerous quest: to stop the era's most infamous serial killer, Dr. Enoch Leng from bringing his plans to fruition. If she does, she can finally prevent the events that led to the shocking deaths of her sister and brother. Meanwhile, in present-day New York, Agent Pendergast is desperate to reunite with Constance before she gets stuck in the past forever..

As tension between Mars and Earth mounts, and terrorism plagues the Martian city of Londres Nova, 16-year-old David Draper is fighting his own lonely war. A gifted chemist vying for a place at the university, David leads a secret life as a manufacturer for a ruthless drug dealer. When his friend Leelee goes missing, leaving signs of the dealer's involvement, David takes it upon himself to save her. But first he must shake his aunt Bobbie Draper, an ex-marine who has been set adrift in her own life after a mysterious series of events nobody is talking about.