Showing results by narrator "Gisela Chípe" in All Categories

Under the light of ancient Western philosophies, our darker moods like grief, anguish, and depression can seem irrational. When viewed through the lens of modern psychology, they can even look like mental disorders. The self-help industry, determined to sell us the promise of a brighter future, can sometimes leave us feeling ashamed that we are not more grateful, happy, or optimistic. Night Vision invites us to consider a different approach to life, one in which we stop feeling bad about feeling bad.

In June 1993, a group of young guerilla filmmakers spent four weeks making Horror Movie, a notorious, disturbing, art-house horror flick. The weird part? Only three of the film’s scenes were ever released to the public, but Horror Movie has nevertheless grown a rabid fanbase. Three decades later, Hollywood is pushing for a big budget reboot.

Everybody has regrets, Daniel H. Pink explains in The Power of Regret. They’re a universal and healthy part of being human. And understanding how regret works can help us make smarter decisions, perform better at work and school, and bring greater meaning to our lives.

El Salvador, 1923. Graciela, a young girl growing up on a volcano in a community of Indigenous women, is summoned to the capital, where she is claimed as an oracle for a rising dictator. There she meets Consuelo, the sister she has never known, who was stolen from their home before Graciela was born. The two spend years under the cruel El Gran Pendejo’s regime, unwillingly helping his reign of terror, until genocide strikes the community from which they hail.

In a small dorm room at a liberal arts college in Vermont, a young woman settles into the warm blue light of her desk lamp before calling the mother she left behind in northeastern Brazil. Four thousand miles apart and bound by the angular confines of a Skype window, they ask each other a simple question: what’s the news? Offscreen, little about their lives seems newsworthy. The daughter writes her papers in the library at midnight, eats in the dining hall with the other international students, and raises her hand in class to speak in a language the mother cannot understand.

Twelve-year-old Ana wants nothing more than to escape the future set for her and her classmates in her small mining village. Boys her age are beginning to leave school to become silver miners and girls her age are destined to one day be the wives of miners. But when her often ill 11-year-old brother is forced by their demanding father to start work in the mines, Ana gives up her dreams of school to volunteer in his place. The world of silver mining though is dark and dangerous and the men who work there don't want a girl in their way.

The Actual Star takes listeners on a journey over thousands of years and six continents—collapsing three separate timelines into one cave in the Belizean jungle. An epic saga of three reincarnated souls, this novel demonstrates the entanglements of tradition and progress, sister and stranger, love and hate. The book jumps forward and backward in time among a pair of twins who ruled a Maya kingdom, a young American on a trip of self-discovery, and two dangerous charismatics in a conflict that will determine the fate of the few humans left on Earth after massive climate change.

Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, renowned marine biologist and co-founder of the All We Can Save climate initiative, compiles the best science and nature writing of the year.

After a chance encounter at a Santiago nightclub, aspiring poet Gonzalo reunites with his first love, Carla. Though their desire for each other is still intact, much has changed: among other things, Carla now has a six-year-old son, Vicente. Soon the three form a happy sort-of family—a stepfamily, though no such word exists in their language. Eventually, their ambitions pull the lovers in different directions—in Gonzalo’s case, all the way to New York. Though Gonzalo takes his books when he goes, still, Vicente inherits his ex-stepfather’s love of poetry.

Two Colombian expats meet as strangers on the rainy streets of New York City, both burdened with traumatic pasts. In Cuba, a woman discovers her deceased brother’s bones have been stolen, and the love of her life returns from Ecuador for a one-night visit. A cash-strapped couple hustles in Miami, to life-altering ends.

Getting paid $80,000 to stay in bed for 13 weeks? That sounds like a dream job for Vanessa, one of 12 participants chosen for a bedrest study. Played by Karla Souza (How to Get Away with Murder), Vanessa is looking forward to earning extra money while putting her troubles—her mom’s death, an unplanned pregnancy, and a falling out with her cousin/best friend Brigid (Zoë Winters of Succession)—on pause. Vanessa quickly realizes, however, that she cannot outrun her problems...especially with her legs beginning to atrophy.

John Alves, son of a famous Presbyterian martyr on the Portuguese island of Madeira, spends his childhood in jail and in poverty. When he meets Mary Freitas—though the adopted daughter of a master botanist, her true lineage is the subject of dangerous rumor—a spark kindles a lasting bond. But soon their families must confront the rising blood tide of warfare between Catholics and Protestants. Fleeing with only what they can carry, John and Mary are separated and arrive at different times and places in a rapidly growing and changing mid-nineteenth-century Illinois.

It’s no secret that we are overworked, overpressured, and edging burnout. Unsurprisingly, this fact is as old as time - and that’s why we see so many prayer circles within a multitude of church traditions. These gatherings are a trusted space where people seek help, hope, and peace, energized by God and one another. This book, curated by acclaimed author Sarah Bessey, celebrates and honors that prayerful tradition in a literary form.

The seven houses in these seven stories are empty. Some are devoid of love or life or furniture, of people or the truth or of memories. But in Samanta Schweblin’s tense, visionary tales, something always creeps back in: a ghost, a fight, trespassers, a list of things to do before you die, a child’s first encounter with a dark choice or the fallibility of parents.

Thirtysomething Flores and her mother, Paula, still live in the same Brooklyn apartment, but that may be the only thing they have in common. It’s been nearly three years since they lost beloved husband and father Martín, who had always been the bridge between them. One day, cleaning beneath his urn, Flores discovers a note written in her mother’s handwriting: Perdóname si te falle. Recuerda que siempre te quise. (“Forgive me if I failed you. Remember that I always loved you.”) But what would Paula need forgiveness for?

Told with penetrating insight, humor, and unexpected tenderness, Wait is a story about a family swimming against the social currents that erode bonds: housing precarity, immigration systems, and inherited wealth. But it is also a story about love, wit, and sisterhood, and how two sisters cling to each other in the midst of cataclysmic change, all the while dreaming about a better future.

An exquisite new collection from a Pulitzer Prize-winning master of the short story, the culmination of a five-decade career: work that takes us beneath the placid surface of suburban life into the elusive strangeness of the everyday.

What happens when you pack almost a dozen jails, bulging at the seams with society’s cast-offs, onto a spit of landfill purposefully hidden from public view? Prize-winning journalists Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau have spent two years interviewing more than 130 people comprising a broad cross section of lives touched by New York City's Rikers Island prison complex—from incarcerated people and their relatives, to officers, lawyers, and commissioners, with stories spanning the 1970s to the present day. The portrait that emerges calls into question the very nature of justice in America.

Mexico in the 1970s is a dangerous country, even for Maite, a secretary who spends her life seeking the romance found in cheap comic books and ignoring the activists protesting around the city. When her next-door neighbor, the beautiful art student Leonora, disappears under suspicious circumstances, Maite finds herself searching for the missing woman—and journeying deeper into Leonora’s secret life of student radicals and dissidents.

Driven and recklessly daring, Martin Sabater follows his lifelong dream of owning a cacao plantation in Valle del Cauca. But on the night of a spectacular gala, he disappears—and is never seen again. Now his hacienda is a budding Catholic hospital saving lives during an emerging epidemic. And novice nun “Sor Puri” is there to uncover the truth behind Martin’s disappearance. But her real identity—and her past with the heartbreakingly charismatic Martin—will put far more than her perilous search at risk.