Showing results by narrator "Tracy Smith" in All Categories

Shady Rest, Texas, has the dubious reputation for being the deadliest town in America. Getting yourself killed is as easy as blinking and twice as quick. Sure enough, Matt Jensen hasn't swallowed his whisky before the town's marshal is gunned down before his eyes. Matt defends himself by putting two bullets in the shooter's chest, unaware that he's in line for a $5,000 bounty - as long as he stays in Shady Rest to collect it. And staying gets even more tempting when a red haired beauty decides to be the next town marshal....

In 2020, heartsick from constant assaults on Black life, Tracy K. Smith found herself soul-searching and digging into the historical archive for help navigating the “din of human division and strife.” With lyricism and urgency, Smith draws on several avenues of thinking—personal, documentary, and spiritual—to understand who we are as a nation and what we might hope to mean to one another.

In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope.

Tracy K. Smith has a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be Black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.

Prince Corum has defeated the Chaos Lord Arioch. But any peace for him and his faithful Rhalina is brief. His actions have evoked the murderous anger of Arioch’s sister, the dreaded Xiombarg. The Prince in the Scarlet Robe must continue his odyssey, face the terror of the Mabden armies, and challenge the might of the Queen of the Swords. Only the legendary City of the Pyramid offers a glimmer of hope. But Corum must get there first, and along the way he will encounter horrifying creatures, strange forms of sorcery, and new planes of existence.

When sworn protectors of Earth, the Justice Platoon, are all horribly killed, their former arch-enemies come crawling out of the woodwork. Outnumbered, outgunned, and out of options, the US Government has no choice but to activate the Sidekicks Initiative, dragging the Platoon's middle-aged ex-sidekicks out of retirement. Now these three reluctant, out of shape former child-wonders must work together to stop the rising tide of supervillainy, avenge their former mentors' deaths, and bring the world back from the brink of destruction.

The old races have perished. Across the 15 planes of reality, the ceaseless struggle between Law and Chaos continues. Corum, the Prince in the Scarlet Robe, has destroyed two of the company of Chaos, but Mabelode the Faceless will not see his actions go unpunished. The Eternal Champion must call upon the power of other incarnations - Elric and Erekosë - and travel to the last five planes to defeat the King of the Swords. At stake: not only the balance of forces at the crux of existence but also a personal vendetta....

Restless cowpoke Perley Gates wanted nothing more than to track down the grandfather who abandoned his family years ago. What he found was the crazy old sidewinder barely hanging on after a Sioux massacre. The old man’s dying wish was to make things right for deserting his kin — by giving his strong-willed grandson Perley clues to the whereabouts of a buried fortune in gold.

The town of Midnight sits on a veil between the living and hell and this supernatural thriller takes a journey into that remote Texas town where nothing is what it seems. There is no such thing as bad publicity, except in Midnight, where the residents like to keep to themselves. When psychic Manfred Bernardo finds himself embroiled in a scandal and hounded by the press after one of his regular clients dies during a reading, he turns to enigmatic, beautiful, and dangerous Olivia Charity for help.

In the ancient Castle Erorn, Corum of the Scarlet Robe dwells in isolation and sorrow. He has outlived his great love, Rhalina, and is tormented by voices in his dreams - a crowd of shadowy figures chanting his name. Unable to ignore their calls for help any longer, he will travel through eons of time to an age of tragedy, where the people of Tuha-na-Cremm Croich, descendants of Rhalina, are persecuted by the giant gods of the Cold Folk. A great black bull has the power needed to defeat the monsters of a new age.

Jon-Tom and his friends have seen better days. After his motley crew moved heaven and Earth to save civilization at the battle of Jo-Troom Gate, his merry band went its separate ways. Mudge, the foul-mouthed otter, eagerly returned to thieving, drinking, and whoring, while Talea, the girl of Jon-Tom’s dreams, embarked on her own adventures, leaving him to study magic with Clothahump, the irascible wizard whose inept spell trapped him in this weird otherworld in the first place.

Winter blankets the land, and more than just hope has died. Prevented from invading the Fhrey homeland by the tower of Avempartha, the western army seeks a way across the Nidwalden River before the fane obtains the secret of dragons. As time runs out for both humanity and the mystic Suri, the only chance for the living rests with the dead. Having made their fateful choice, can a handful of misfits do the impossible, or are they forever lost to an inescapable grave? Do gods truly exist? Is it possible to know the future? And what lies beyond the veil of death?

T.S. Eliot was a towering figure in 20th-century literature, a renowned poet, playwright, and critic whose work - including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), The Waste Land (1922), Four Quartets (1943), and Murder in the Cathedral (1935) - continues to be among the most-read and influential in the canon of American literature. The Essential T.S. Eliot collects Eliot’s most lasting and important poetry in one career-spanning audiobook, with an introduction from Vijay Seshadri, one of our foremost poets.

After years of warfare, humanity has gained the upper hand and has pushed the Fhrey to the edge of their homeland but no farther. Now comes the pivotal moment. Persephone’s plan to use the stalemate to seek peace is destroyed by an unexpected betrayal that threatens to hand victory to the Fhrey and leaves a loved one in peril.

In Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America's contemporary moment both to our nation's fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy. Smith's signature voice - inquisitive, lyrical, and wry - turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men, and violence.

As the old gods awaken and satrapies splinter, the Chromeria races to find its lost Prism, the only man who may be able to stop catastrophe. But Gavin Guile is enslaved on a pirate galley. Worse, Gavin no longer has the one thing that defined him - the ability to draft. Without the protection of his father, Kip Guile will have to face a master of shadows alone as his grandfather moves to choose a new Prism and put himself in power.

Jon-Tom and Mudge are bored. Their adventuring days long behind them, the spellsinger and his once-thieving otter sidekick have settled into a life of tepid domesticity, and they are sick of it. They hunger for an old-fashioned adventure, but there are no more great evils to combat. And so they decide to follow the music. Literally.

The Hunter from the Woods marks the much-anticipated return of Michael Gallatin, the lycanthropic hero of Robert McCammon's classic, The Wolf's Hour. These all-new, interlinked stories offer a full measure of McCammon's trademark narrative excitement, and comprise a fascinating composite portrait of a unique fictional creation. The volume opens with a pair of brief glimpses into Michael's early life in Russia and his initial recruitment into the British Secret Service. It ends with a haunting vision of the werewolf at twilight.

Flintlock takes no pleasure in killing. But when his pal O’Hara gets bullwhipped by a trio of lowdown prairie rats, Flintlock finds sanctuary for his wounded friend at the cabin of a kindly miner and his lovely daughter. Flintlock heads out to hunt down some food. But there’s more than just deer lurking in these woods. A bloodthirsty band of eight savage raiders — led by a half-mad gunslinger called The Old Man of the Mountain — wage a full-scale attack on the miner’s cabin.

After crossing the dry Arizona desert — and missing six meals in a row — Sam Flintlock is flat-out desperate. For food. For work. For lodgings. Luckily, he finds all three in the high timber country east of the Mogollon River. A very young and pretty heiress, Lucy Cullen, has an unusual proposition for the bounty hunter. She will pay him cold, hard cash to spend one full week in the gothic mansion of her murdered uncle. What’s the catch? The place is haunted....