Showing results by narrator "JIm Meskimen" in All Categories

The publication of The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy is a literary event that marks the first time all of James Purdy's short stories - 56 in number, including seven drawn from his unpublished archives - have been collected in a single volume. As prolific as he was unclassifiable, James Purdy was considered one of the greatest - and most underappreciated - writers in America in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Published in commemoration of the centennial of President John F. Kennedy's birth, here is the definitive compendium of JFK's most important and brilliant speeches, accompanied by a commentary and reflections by leading American and internationals figures - including Senator Elizabeth Warren, David McCullough, Kofi Annan, and the Dalai Lama.

Who is the Child of Night? That’s what small-town reporter Will Barbee must find out. Inexorably drawn into investigating a rash of grisly deaths, he soon finds himself embroiled in something far beyond mortal understanding. Doggedly pursuing his investigations, he meets the mysterious and seductive April Bell and starts having disturbing, tantalizing dreams in which he does terrible things - things that are stranger and wilder than his worst nightmares. Then his friends begin dying one by one, and he slowly realizes that an unspeakable evil has been unleashed.

Both an all-inclusive, how-to guide to navigating cancer and a grieving husband's elegy for his lost love, We Were Better Together is an essential resource for couples facing a cancer diagnosis as well as a much-needed beacon of resilience and hope.

Ansel Packer is scheduled to die in twelve hours. But this is not his story. Ansel doesn't want to die; he wants to be celebrated, understood. Yet now he awaits the same fate he forced on those girls, years ago. This is the story of the women who survive. As the clock ticks down, three women—a mother, a sister, a detective—reckon with the choices that culminate in tragedy, the impact on those in its wake, and the possibility of redemption.

Portia Kane is having a meltdown. After escaping her ritzy Florida life and her cheating pornographer husband, she finds herself back in South Jersey, a place that remains largely unchanged from the years of her unhappy youth. Lost and alone, looking to find the goodness she believes still exists in the world, Portia sets off to save herself by saving someone else - a beloved high school English teacher who has retired after a traumatic incident.

As the early years of detective fiction gave way to two separate golden ages - of hard-boiled tales in America and intricately-plotted, so-called “cozy” murders in Britain - the legacy of Sherlock Holmes, with his fierce devotion to science and logic, gave way to street smarts on the one hand and social insight on the other, but even though these new sub-genres went their own ways, their detectives still required intelligence and clear-sightedness as characterized the earliest works of detective fiction: the trademarks of Sherlock Holmes, and of all the detectives featured here.

Johnny D. Boggs turns the battlefield itself into a character in this historical retelling of Custer's Last Stand, when George Custer led most of his command to annihilation at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in southern Montana in 1876. More than 40 first-person narratives are used - Indian and white, military and civilian, men and women - to paint a panorama of the battle itself. Boggs brings the events and personalities of the Battle of the Little Bighorn to life in a series of first-hand accounts.

On December 10, 1938, Atlanta burned again. In the back lot at David O. Selznick's studio, sets from a dozen old pictures were pushed together and set ablaze to provide a backdrop for the climax of what Selznick promised to be the movie of the century: Gone with the Wind. Toby Peters, then just a studio security guard, was on hand to help keep the Confederate extras in line. When the fire was over, he found one of them dead, impaled on his own sword.

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.

Young Kit Kellan has led a rough-and-tumble life - knocking around the Vega System in his youth as a tiger hunter, a brawler, and a bouncer in a bar. But his real fight is just beginning. Summarily expelled from the prestigious Terra University, he is taken into custody by an agent of the System Bureau of Investigation (SBI). Kit's crime: thinking too much and thinking too well. He’s not in custody for long, however. Snatched from captivity by the People’s Revolutionary Society, Kit sets out an epic adventure that will take him to the farthest reaches of the universe.

In February 1942, Californians may be living in fear of a Japanese attack, but the show must go on. The circus is in town - unfortunately so is a killer saboteur who's targeting the star attractions. Private detective Toby Peters is no stranger to going undercover, but this is the first time his disguise will include a red nose.

Private investigator David Randall, still struggling with guilt over his daughter Lindsey's death, can't bring himself to look at the DVD of her dance recitals. Fortunately, he's distracted by two cases: Socialite Sandy Olaf's missing diamond bracelet, and a missing box that magicians Taft and Lucas Finch say belonged to Houdini.

For all the near-fanatic attention brought each year to the Academy Awards, the organization that dispenses those awards—the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—has yet to be understood. To date, no one has ever produced a thorough account of the Academy’s birth and its awkward adolescence, and the few reports on those periods from outside have always had a glancing, cursory quality. Yet the story of the Academy’s creation and development is a critical piece of Hollywood’s history. Now that story is finally being told.

A husband’s search for his wife’s lover, lost amid the turbulence of the Yom Kippur War, is the heart of this dreamlike novel. Through five different perspectives, Yehoshua explores the realities and consequences of the affair and the search, laying bare deep-rooted tensions within family, between generations, between Jews and Arabs.

Goon Squad is set in a version of modern-day Manchester. Its biggest divergence from the real city is that it - along with most other large urban centers - has a team of superheroes to protect it against unusual threats with which the conventional forces of law and order would have problems.

The ancient jungles of the Yucatan hide a world of secrets ... the secrets of wealth, love, and fate. Now daredevil pilot Kurt Reid is about to tempt fate and fly into the heart of that jungle in search of his destiny—an adventure as daring and dangerous as any undertaken by Indiana Jones. He’s looking for gold, but not just any. He’s after one particular nugget—flying blind into a tropical haystack in search of a very valuable needle.

Twelve miles long and a mile wide, Elysiana is an island off the coast of New Jersey sitting astride the convergence of powerful fault lines, social, political, and existential. It’s a place of beauty and insanity, shared by the angelic and profane, This is a story that could have only happened on the Jersey Shore during the summer of ’69, a time when the social fabric was tearing apart, in a place where that fabric had never been very well knit together.

An early chapter book mystery series featuring the younger siblings of the A to Z Mysteries detectives - something special is coming to Green Lawn - a traveling circus! But when the performers arrive, they need help. Their show is a mess, and Bradley, Brian, Nate, and Lucy are happy to chip in. They fix up the equipment and find dazzling new acts, but what the show needs most is an acrobat. No one in town is brave enough to go up on the high trapeze, except for one mysterious masked person.

In The Drudge Revolution, investigative journalist and author of Newtown: An American Tragedy Matthew Lysiak pulls back the curtain on the world’s most powerful journalist, for the first time telling the inside story of how one man’s visionary belief in the potential of the internet, coupled with the post-Fairness Doctrine growth of conservative talk radio and the rise of cable news and social media, created the perfect storm that seized the narrative from the mainstream media and ushered in the presidency of Donald Trump.