Showing results by narrator "T Ryder Smith" in All Categories

Best known for his glorious comic novels, Charles Portis was also a prolific essayist, travel writer, and newspaper reporter. Now, for the first time, these writings—journalism, short fiction, memoir, travel stories, and even a play—have been brought together in Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany. The collection encompasses the breadth of Portis’s fifty-year writing career, covering topics as varied as road tripping in Baja, Elvis’s visits to his aging mother, and his own boyhood in Arkansas.

It’s been seven years since Gloomy Knob landed in the Ted Stevens High-Security Federal Penitentiary and five years since the end of the war, the one North Korea started when they sent a missile to Cold Storage, Alaska. Serving a life sentence for the murder of his sister, Gloomy spends his time trying to forget about the past. Then one day, Gloomy is snatched from his off-site work station. Instead of celebrating his newfound freedom, Gloomy comes unmoored - he feels he belongs in prison. But his kidnappers believe Gloomy knows where a second nuclear warhead is hidden.

A hardened young veteran from the First World War, Ludwig now works for a monument company, selling stone markers to the survivors of deceased loved ones. Though ambivalent about his job, he suspects there's more to life than earning a living off other people's misfortunes. A self-professed poet, Ludwig soon senses a growing change in his fatherland, a brutality brought upon it by inflation.

When Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker’s art critic and the leading art writer of his generation, published his eye-opening autobiographical essay, “The Art of Dying,” in December 2019, he reported that he had lung cancer and had been given six months of life. Fortunately, his treatment was showing some improvement, and so, he wrote, “These extra months are a luxury that I hope to have put to good use.”

Days ago, Belisarius pulled off the most audacious con job in history. He's rich, he's back with the love of his life, and best of all, he has the Time Gates, arguably the most valuable things in existence. Nothing could spoil this...except the utter destruction of his people and the world they lived on. To save them, he has to make a new deal with the boss he just double-crossed, to travel back in time and work his quantum magic once again, tracking down the source of the wormholes.

There is no precedent in postwar American history for the destruction of the town of Paradise, California. On November 8, 2018, the community of 27,000 people was swallowed by the ferocious Camp Fire, which razed virtually every home and killed at least 85 people. Fire in Paradise is a dramatic and moving narrative of the disaster based on hundreds of in-depth interviews with residents, firefighters and police, and scientific experts.

These interrelated stories are arranged in two sections, one devoted to virtues ("Bravery", "Loyalty", "Chastity", "Charity", and "Forbearance") and the other to vices ("Lust", "Sloth", "Avarice", "Gluttony", and "Vanity"). They are cast with characters who appear and reappear throughout the collection, their actions equally divided between the praiseworthy and the loathsome.

No one thought that MacTrump - Lord of MacTrump Towers, Son of New York - would ascend to the highest position in the kingdom. Yet with the help of his unhappy but dutiful wife Lady MacTrump, his clever daughter Dame Desdivanka, and his coterie of advisers, MacTrump is comfortably ensconced in the White Hold as President of the United Fiefdoms, free to make proclamations to his subjects through his favorite messenger, McTweet. The Democrati, mourning the loss of their cherished leader O'Bama, won't give up without a fight.

In a forgotten corner of western Kentucky lies a haunted forest referred to locally as "The Deadening", where vampire cults roam wild and time is immaterial. Our protagonist and his accomplice - the one and only Carver Canute - set out down the Old Spur Line in search of the legendary Kudzu House, where an old couple is purported to have been swallowed whole by a hungry vine.

Since ancient times, accounts of supernatural activity have mystified us. Ghost stories as we know them did not develop until the late 19th century, but the restless dead haunted the premodern imagination in many forms, as recorded in historical narratives, theological texts, and personal letters. The Penguin Book of the Undead teems with roving hordes of dead warriors, corpses trailed by packs of barking dogs, moaning phantoms haunting deserted ruins, evil spirits emerging from burning carcasses in the form of crows, and zombies with pestilential breath.

Hurricane Matthew is a force to be reckoned with. It has been forecasted to drown the city of Houston in an unrelenting torrent of rain. In the days before its arrival, the city was evacuated, leaving behind only a skeleton police force and civilians unable to flee its destructive path. It’s the perfect time and the perfect place for the perfect crime.

Captain Pausert just can’t catch a break! First, he became the mortal enemy of his fiancée, his home planet, the Empire - and even the Worm World, the darkest threat to mankind in all of space. All because he helped rescue three slave children from their masters. Of course, these three young women were the universally feared Witches of Karres - but how was he to know that?! And after he defeated the Worm World (with the help of the witches, of course), the Empress herself had sent him on a secret mission to stop a nanite plague that was raging across the galaxy.

The follow-up finds Vaara dealing with personal demons and banishment to the graveyard shift in Helsinki’s homicide unit. Thrust into the investigation of a World War II hero and the murder of a Russian businessman’s wife, Vaara is about to find that the past has a deadly reach indeed.

Why do we embalm the deceased? Why are funerals so expensive? Is there a reason coffins are shaped the way they are? Where does the tradition of viewing the body come from? Ceremonies for honoring the deceased are crucial parts of our lives, but few people know where our traditional practices come from—and what they reveal about our history, culture, and beliefs about death. In Last Rites, author Todd Harra takes listeners on a fascinating exploration of American funeral customs—exploring where they came from, what they mean, and how they are still evolving.

When dragons rise from the earth, firefighters are humanity's last line of defense, in this wild near-future fantasy. Firefighter Cole Brannigan is on the verge of retirement after 30 years on the job, and a decade fighting dragons. But during his final fire call, he discovers he's immune to dragon smoke. It's such a rare power that he's immediately conscripted into the elite dragon-fighting force known as the Smoke Eaters. Retirement cancelled, Brannigan is re-assigned as a lowly rookie.

Things in the fishing town of Cold Storage, Alaska, are changing. It's the summer of 1968; the men are wearing their hair long, the Vietnam War is at its height, and multiple assassinations have gripped the country. But some things remain the same. Ellie's bar is still the place to catch up on the town gossip, and there's a lot to talk about, from the boys who have returned from the war (and the ones who haven't), to the robberies that are plaguing the locals, to the new guy in town: a famous monk from Kentucky.

A girl walks home from school. She's tall for her age. She's wearing her winter coat. Her headphones are in. She's hurrying. She never makes it home. In the aftermath, while law enforcement tries to justify the response, one fact remains: A police officer has shot and killed an unarmed 13-year-old girl. The community is thrown into upheaval, leading to unrest, a growing movement to protest the senseless taking of black lives, and the arrival of white supremacist counter-demonstrators.

David Sipress, a dreamer and obsessive drawer living with his Upper West Side family in the age of JFK and Sputnik, goes hazy when it comes to the ceaselessly imparted lessons-on-life from his meticulous father and the angsty expectations of his migraine-prone mother.

In Middle Men, Stegner Fellow and New Yorker contributor Jim Gavin delivers a hilarious and panoramic vision of California, portraying a group of men, from young dreamers to old vets, as they make valiant forays into middle-class respectability. In "Play the Man", a high-school basketball player aspires to a college scholarship; in "Elephant Doors", a production assistant on a game show moonlights as a stand-up comedian; and in the collection's last story, the immensely moving "Costello", a middle-aged plumbing-supplies salesman comes to terms with the death of his wife.

Parenting a teenager is not for the faint of heart. It is during these roller-coaster years that frustrated parents find themselves at their wits' end, barely even recognizing their offspring as they move through the teen years. Carl Pickhardt, Harvard-trained psychologist and the voice of reason behind Psychology Today's advice column, "Surviving (Your Child's) Adolescence," shares critical insights and practical tools that parents need to know along their child's rocky road toward independence and adulthood.