Showing results by narrator "Katharine Chin" in All Categories

Pride. Popularity . . . Poetry? Middle school. Ruby and Mia are total opposites: Ruby is a little awkward, not a “joiner,” and loves to write poetry. While Mia is type A, popular(ish), and wants to be class prez. They used to be friends. But now they have nothing in common anymore. . . . Or do they?

Jin Zhara already had enough to worry about—appeasing her stepmother’s cruel whims, looking after her blind younger sister, and keeping her own magical gifts under control—without having to deal with rumors of monsters re-emerging in the marsh. But when a chance encounter with an easily flustered young man named Han brings her into contact with a secret magical liberation organization called the Guardians of Dawn, Zhara realizes there may be more to these rumors than she thought.

Mickey7 is an Expendable: a disposable employee on a human expedition sent to colonise the ice world Niflheim. Whenever there's a mission that's too dangerous - even suicidal - the crew turns to Mickey. After one iteration dies, a new body is regenerated with most of his memories intact. Mickey signed on to escape from both bad debts and boredom on Midgard. After six deaths, Mickey7 understands the terms of his deal...and why it was the only colonial position unfilled when he took it.

Nearly a decade ago, iconic magician Violet Volk performed her greatest trick yet: vanishing mid-act. Though she hasn’t been seen since, her hold on the public imagination is stronger than ever. While Violet sought out the spotlight, her sister Sasha always had to be the responsible one, taking over their mother’s hair salon and building a quiet life for her beloved daughter, Quinn. But Sasha can never seem to escape her sister’s orbit or her memories of their unresolved, tumultuous relationship.

A boy who hates bugs starts to see them everywhere. A basketball player’s skin starts to almost drip off his hands—but no one else can see it. Three friends find a hole in the ground that just gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger... And each story is introduced by Stine himself, providing a personal touch sure to delight fans. Laced with Stine’s signature humor and a hefty dose of nightmarish fun, Stinetinglers is perfect for fans of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Stine’s own Goosebumps books.

From R.L. Stine, the master of horror for young listeners, comes ten brand new stories that are sure to have you keeping the light on at bedtime tonight. A boy thinks that a dream factory will help him make his slumber more fun...but what's the line between dream and nightmare? Two kids find an abandoned shack on the side of the road and are determined to make it their new treehouse... but is it as abandoned as it seems? A boy wants to impress a birthday party with this amateur magician skills...but how far will he go to wow the crowd?

“What's most compelling about a scientific story is the way it challenges us to think about the concepts we take for granted,” writes guest editor Carl Zimmer in his introduction. The essays in this year’s Best American Science and Nature Writing probe at the ordinary and urge us to think more deeply about our place in the world around us.

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic observations of the world around them.

From New York Times bestselling author R.L. Stine, the master of horror for young audiences, comes 10 new stories that are sure to leave you shivering. Stine also reads the introduction to each story! Two kids embark on a field trip to the zoo...and stumble upon a creature they never expected to meet. A boy makes a machine that puts kids in charge...but at what cost? A child is sure his new house is haunted...but is it just in his head? And each story comes with a personal introduction from Stine himself.

In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma brings us eight wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of home. A woman lives in a house with all her ex-boyfriends. A toxic friendship grows up around a drug that makes you invisible. An ancient ritual might heal you of anything—if you bury yourself alive.

After getting rejected by every single Ivy League she applied to and falling short of all her Asian immigrant parents’ expectations, seventeen-year-old Jenna Chen makes a wish to become her smarter, infinitely more successful Harvard-bound cousin, Jessica Chen—only for her wish to come true. Literally. Now trapped inside Jessica’s body, with access to Jessica’s most private journals and secrets, Jenna soon discovers that being the top student at the elite, highly competitive Havenwood Private Academy isn’t quite what she imagined.

“Short stories have to accomplish a nearly impossible magic trick: to introduce a world often much stranger than our own and make you care about it in a matter of pages,” writes R. F. Kuang in her introduction. “The most important part of this magic trick is just a willingness to get weird.” The stories in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 are brimming with bizarre and otherworldly premises.

Emma Page grew up the black sheep in a bookish household, raised to believe that fine literature is the only worthy type of fiction. Her parents, self-proclaimed “serious” authors who run their own vanity press, The Mighty Pages, mingle in highbrow social circles that look down on anything too popular or mainstream, while her sister, Jess, is a powerful social media influencer whose stylish reviews can make or break a novel.

Sixteen-year-old Lynda Fan has the skills and the drive to get into the Rhode Island School of Design—but not the money. Her parents are too busy paying for her stepsister’s violin lessons to help Lynda get into art school. So when her rich and arrogant classmate, Angela Wu, offers to hire Lynda as a character designer for an otome game—a love story-based video game—she jumps at the opportunity. Lynda isn’t exactly a romantic, but in pursuit of her dreams, she discovers things she never knew about herself while also finding love with every heart she draws.

Thanks to her Ye-Ye’s epic scavenger hunts, thirteen-year-old Ruby Chu knows San Francisco like the back of her hand. But after his death, she feels lost, and it seems like everyone—from her best friends to her older sister—is abandoning her. After Ruby gets in major trouble at school, her parents decide she has to spend the summer at a local senior center with her grandmother, Nai-Nai, and Nai-Nai’s friends for company. When a new boy from Ruby’s grade, Liam Yeung, starts showing up too, Ruby’s humiliation is complete.

Seven, who works as a cleaner at a chiropractor's office, reencounters Cecilia, a woman who has obsessed her since their school days. As the two of them board the same bus—each dubiously claiming not to be following the other—their chance meeting spurs a series of intensely vivid and corporeal memories. As past and present bleed together, Seven can feel her desire begin to unmoor her from the flow of time.

For listeners of Pachinko and The Mountains Sing, a gorgeously poetic family saga that begins at the dawn of the Chinese Revolution and spans 100 years to trace the intricate lives of four generations of Chinese and Chinese American women grappling with history, obligations, betrayal, and love in order to come into their own power and learn not just how to survive but flourish.

Haiwen is buying bananas at a 99 Ranch Market in Los Angeles when he looks up and sees Suchi, his Suchi, for the first time in sixty years. To recently widowed Haiwen it feels like a second chance, but Suchi has only survived by refusing to look back. Suchi was seven when she first met Haiwen in their Shanghai neighborhood, drawn by the sound of his violin. Their childhood friendship blossomed into soul-deep love, but when Haiwen secretly enlisted in the Nationalist army in 1947 to save his brother from the draft, she was left with just his violin and a note: Forgive me.

Lily Xiao can’t wait to go to Camp Rock Out this summer, where she’ll finally be able to shed her “class robot” good girl reputation and start her journey to becoming the next Eddie Vedder! And she can’t wait to do it with her best friend and cousin, Vivian, who’s just moved from Taiwan to Lily’s California hometown. But as the two cousins work their way through seventh grade, Vivian struggles more and more with her schoolwork, which is all taught in English. If Vivian can’t get her grades up, her parents won’t let her go to rock camp.

When Nozomi Nagai pictured the ideal summer romance, a fake one wasn't what she had in mind. That was before she met the perfect girl. Willow is gorgeous, glamorous, and…heartbroken? And when she enlists Nozomi to pose as her new girlfriend to make her ex jealous, Nozomi is a willing volunteer. Because Nozomi has a master plan of her own: one to show Willow she's better than a stand-in, and turn their fauxmance into something real. But as the lies pile up, it's not long before Nozomi's schemes take a turn toward disaster…and maybe a chance at love she didn't plan for.