Showing results by narrator "William Dufris" in All Categories

For any normal teenage boy, having two and a half younger sisters would be enough to deal with. But Simwan Deavy's life isn't normal. His family is non-Ord - short for "non-Ordinary" - which means that at school, he and his sisters learn hexing and enchanting along with history and math. It also means they have a ghost for an uncle and a cat who talks. Still, everything is going well for Simwan - until a bottle of Truth is stolen from the local pharmacy.

Enter Valentino, a mild-mannered UCLA film archivist, who buys a decrepit movie palace and uncovers a skeleton in the secret Prohibition basement. He then makes a second discovery: long-lost, priceless, reels of film: Erich von Stroheim's infamous Greed. The LAPD wants to take the reels as evidence, jeopardizing the precious old film.

Denby has fun snarking the snarkers, expelling the bums and promoting the true wits, but he is also making a serious point: the Internet has put snark on steroids. In politics, snark means the lowest, most insinuating and insulting side can win. For the young, a savage piece of gossip could ruin a reputation and possibly a future career. And for all of us, snark just sucks the humor out of life. Denby defends the right of any of us to be cruel but shows us how the real pros pull it off. Snark, he says, is for the amateurs.

Ethan Gage is out to foil Napoleon's coronation as emperor, play double agent between France and England, and turn the tide of war - while attempting to save his own life and his marriage. Gage fought beside Napoleon Bonaparte in Egypt and was his agent in Italy, America, and Greece. But this relationship, which at the best of times was uneasy, has gone sour, and now Ethan wants to make Napoleon pay for kidnapping his son, Harry, and nearly killing his wife, Astiza.

What do the Merlin Game, the Penny Skim, the Doolally Snadoodle, and the Afterparty Snuke have in common? They're all the work of world-class con artist and master bafflegabber Radar Hoverlander. Radar’s been "on the snuke" since childhood, but he's still looking for his California Roll, the one big scam that'll set him up in sushi for life. Trouble arrives in the stunning, sassy package of Allie Quinn---either the last true innocent or a con artist so slick she makes Radar look like a Quaker.

Sharon MacDonald has a problem. It’s not being under house arrest. It’s not the Iranian guy who just fell from the twenty-fifth floor of her apartment building. It’s not even the police surveillance that’s preventing her from getting to her marijuana grow rooms. Sharon’s problem is a stranger named Ray: He’s too good looking, and his business proposal sounds too good to be true.Detective Gord Bergeron has problems, too.

Lucien Ortane is a Paragon in the Etherian Empire. His job is to explore the universe and spread Etherian doctrines of peace, justice, and immortality to sentient beings everywhere. Like all Paragons and most citizens, Lucien believes that Etherus, the benevolent ruler of the empire, is exactly who he claims to be: the one true God and creator of the universe.

Despite unprecedented victories on the part of humanity, the war with the alien Chiata Horde drags on. The Chiata may be bewildered by the cunning tenacity of General Alexander Moore and the men and women who fight at his side, but they have no intention of beating a hasty retreat. In fact, intelligence suggests that the Chiata Invasion is at hand, and with numbers sure to overwhelm humankind.

At 35, Mike Cohen lives the American dream. With billions in the bank and his own venture capital firm, he's succeeded beyond his Russian immigrant mother's wildest hopes. The only problem? A car accident that leaves Mike's mother with memory problems. Brainocytes, a new technology developed by one of Mike's portfolio companies, may be the answer to his mother's injury - and offer applications that push the limits of the human mind. Only Mike isn't the only one who sees its potential.

Tom Sawyer does not like school. He does not like work, and he never wants to get out of bed in the morning. But he likes swimming and fishing, and having adventures with his friends. And he has a lot of adventures. One night, he and his friend Huck Finn go to the graveyard to look for ghosts.They don’t see any ghosts that night. They see something worse than a ghost – much, much worse.

Fleeing the respectable society that wants to "sivilize" him, Huck Finn shoves off with Jim on a rhapsodic raft journey down the Mississippi River. The two bind themselves to one another, becoming intimate friends and agreeing "there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft".

From a distinguished chronicler of American social history and political culture, An Unfinished Season captures the postwar moment of the 1950s when the modern world lay just over the horizon. In a time of rabid anticommunism, worker unrest, and government corruption, even the small-town family could not escape the nationwide suspicion and dread of "the enemy within".

The High, a band with a few hit songs in the late 1970s, have reunited to play the nostalgia circuit at casinos. But for bassist Barry and lead singer Cliff, this tour promises to be unforgettable and even more worthwhile than ever. In this fourth installment of the Toronto series, these two band members turn the tables on the gritty underworld of casinos, as they rob the loan sharks and drug dealers who work at every stop of the tour.

Pleskit Meenom, the first alien to go to school on Earth, is starting to fit in with his new class. It's not easy, given how slippery the language is. (Just how many meanings does the word "cool" have, anyway?) But the biggest problem is Jordan Lynch, the class bully who just can't resist picking on the new kid. Finally Pleskit and his new best friend, Tim Tompkins, decide to take action. But taking action when you have alien technology at your disposal can mean taking things just a little too far...and we do mean little!

Traitor. Divider. Defender of slavery. This damning portrayal of Robert E. Lee has persisted through 150 years of history books. And yet it has no basis in fact. Weaving forgotten facts and revelations (Lee considered slavery a moral outrage) with striking personal details (for years he carried his weakened mother to and from her carriage), biographer John Perry crafts a compelling treatment of the virtuous warrior who endured withering opposition and sacrificed all to stand for Constitutional freedoms.

Nine brilliantly told and connected stories take place in a post-apocalyptic world sometime in the near future and follow the narrator at different stages of his life, trying to survive in a savage landscape of climate change, plague, larceny, and a new sexual order.

It is the 21st century. Convicts are sentenced to asteroids that move in ever-widening solar orbits, timed to return when their terms run out. But a few ambitious administrators discover that small "errors" in velocity can rid them of selected groups altogether: the hardcore violent, the mentally defective, and especially the political dissidents.

The aliens have made contact! But because they consider Earth a small, backwater planet, they send only one ambassador. The ambassador brings along his son, Pleskit, and (for political reasons) insists the boy should attend a regular school. Science-fiction loving Tim Tompkins is desperate to befriend the alien...and Pleskit is going to need a friend, because someone is trying to sabotage the mission.

Dark Space, the last refuge of humanity, is overrun; its citizens are either enslaved or dead. The relentless Sythians have slaughtered humanity wherever they could find them, and now only a few hundred survivors remain. Desperate to escape, these few chase rumors of a lost sector of humanity and end up on Avilon, a planet covered with a vast, kilometers-high city that lies hidden and shielded from the rest of the galaxy by its impossibly advanced technology and its benevolent ruler.

Hotdog and his friends are going on a mad adventure to help a baby bird find his missing mom! They'll climb to crazy heights to find her! But can they handle dirty diapers and karate-chopping roosters along the way?