Showing results by narrator "Natalie" in All Categories

I'm Vanessa Barsetti, the daughter of the infamous Crow Barsetti. My father taught me how to fight. If a man lays a hand on me, I'll put him in his grave. As a Barsetti, I'm proud, stubborn, and don't take nonsense from anybody. I walk home from a bar and take the wrong path. And witness a brutal crime. The murderer won't let me go. He's handsome, lethal, and terrifying. With tattoos on his forearms and a presence full of threat, he's a shade of evil I've never encountered. And then he tells me the most terrifying thing of all. His name is Bones.

Once there was a prophecy that a chosen one would rise to defeat the Eternal Khan, an immortal god-king. But the prophecy was wrong. Now Jian, the former chosen hero, is just an ordinary young man trying to find his own way. But he may yet have an extraordinary destiny, because he joins forces with Taishi, his grumpy grandmaster, who instructs him in the ways of her family’s powerful war art. Jian still has a long way to go before he can become her heir, so she recruits a band of elderly grandmasters out of retirement to whip him into shape and help with this one last job.

"The Great Failure is a boundless embrace, leaving nothing out. I wanted to learn the truth, to become whole. If I could touch the dark nature in someone else, I could know it in myself." So begins Natalie Goldberg in this candid exploration of her life. Here, Goldberg makes sense of primary relationships between father and daughter, teacher and student, and exemplifies the accomplishment available when creating daily writing practices.

Zhu Yuanzhang, the Radiant King, is riding high after her victory that tore southern China from its Mongol masters. Now she burns with a new desire: to seize the throne and crown herself emperor. But Zhu isn’t the only one with imperial ambitions. Her neighbor in the south, the courtesan Madam Zhang, wants the throne for her husband—and she’s strong enough to wipe Zhu off the map. To stay in the game, Zhu will have to gamble everything on a risky alliance with an old enemy: the talented but unstable eunuch general Ouyang, who has already sacrificed everything for a chance at revenge.

He is ice cold. Both his personality and his skin. When his icy gaze lands on me it freezes me temporarily, but the first time he touches me....Sparks fly. Not the romantic kind. The tattoos on his pale skin illuminate and they are brighter than the Northern Lights. And then something in his eyes changes, making him less callous, less cold. And making me hot.

Provocative and controversial, socially conscious and politically charged, wildly imaginative yet deeply grounded, the thirty-two never-before-published stories, essays, and poems in The Last Dangerous Visions stand as a testament to Ellison’s lifelong pursuit of art, uniting a diverse range of science fiction writers both famous and newly minted, including Max Brooks, Edward Bryant, Cecil Castellucci, James S. A. Corey, Howard Fast, Patricia Hodgell, Dan Simmons, Robert Sheckley, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Mildred Downey Broxon, and Cory Doctorow, among others.

I’m supposed to be his prisoner—but I’m the one that won’t let him leave. Every time he has a new hit, the separation is unbearable. I wait for him to come home on pins and needles. I paint alone in the bedroom, and now my artwork has changed. I used to paint homes and landscapes…but now I’ve painted a person. A man standing on the bank of a lake surrounded by snow.

2023, The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History: A costume conservator is preparing an exhibition featuring movie costumes from the 1920s to present day. As she gingerly places a gown once worn by Greta Garbo on a mannequin, she discovers another name hidden beneath the designer's label, leaving her to wonder—who is Zora Lily?

What makes a romance novel a romance? Writing a well-structured romance isn't the same as writing any other genre - something the popular novel and screenwriting guides don't address. The romance arc is made up of its own story beats. Told in conversational (and often irreverent) prose, Romancing the Beat is like sitting down to coffee with romance editor and author Gwen Hayes while she explains story structure - the way she does with her clients, some of whom are regular inhabitants of the best-seller lists.

From Cixin Liu, the New York Times best-selling author of The Three-Body Problem, To Hold Up the Sky is a breathtaking collection of imaginative science fiction.

In the summer of 1942, the Rabinowitz family narrowly escaped the Nazi ghetto in their Polish town by fleeing to the forbidding Bialowieza Forest. They miraculously survived two years in the woods—through brutal winters, Typhus outbreaks, and merciless Nazi raids—until they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. After the war, they trekked across the Alps into Italy, where they settled as refugees before eventually immigrating to the United States.

In Aspen, Colorado, in 1941, Rachel Brewster is a slalom skier at the National Downhill and Slalom Championships. Little Ray, as she is called, finishes nowhere near the podium, but she manages to get pregnant. Back home, in New England, Little Ray becomes a ski instructor. Her son, Adam, grows up in a family that defies conventions and evades questions concerning the eventful past. Years later, looking for answers, he will go to Aspen. In the Hotel Jerome, where he was conceived, Adam will meet some ghosts; in The Last Chairlift, they aren’t the first or last ghosts he sees.

It’s been twenty-five years since The Midnight Club last convened. A tight-knit group of college friends bonded by late nights at the campus literary magazine, they’re also bonded by something darker: the death of their brilliant friend Jennet junior year. But now, decades later, a mysterious invitation has pulled them back to the pine-shrouded Vermont town where it all began. As the estranged friends gather for a weeklong campus reunion, they soon learn that their host has an ulterior motive: she wants them to uncover the truth about the night Jennet died.

Heroes die, cowards live. Daughter of a conquered world, Ruying hates the invaders who descended from the heavens long before she was born and defeated the magic of her people with technologies unlike anything her world had ever seen. Blessed by Death, born with the ability to pull the life right out of mortal bodies, Ruying shouldn’t have to fear these foreign invaders, but she does. Especially because she wants to keep herself and her family safe. When Ruying’s Gift is discovered by an enemy prince, he offers her an impossible deal.

The crime scene is as puzzling as it is brutal. Doctor Paul Latham and his wife, Brindel, are found dead in separate beds in their beautiful San Francisco home, each the victim of a gunshot wound to the head. There are no signs of forced entry, and despite the emptied safe it's clear this murder isn't random.

Lisa Jackson’s New York Times bestselling series featuring New Orleans homicide detectives Rick Bentz and Reuben Montoya began with a strangled prostitute in a seedy French Quarter hotel room and a demented killer disguised as a priest. Now evil comes full circle, as Father John returns to terrorize The Big Easy in this highly anticipated series finale!

After Kelsey is assaulted, her FBI foster parents plead with her to spend a few weeks with their friends in Montana while they investigate the incident. Since she would do anything for them, she grudgingly agrees, wondering how she will pass the time on a ranch in the middle of nowhere without going stir crazy. As soon as she catches sight of her two hosts, Greg and Devin, she figures: What better way to take her mind off her troubles than with an affair with one of them?

After overhearing two crooked Chicago cops plotting against her, Avery Pierce goes on the run, not knowing who she can trust. When her low finances force her to take a job as a sex phone operator, she struggles, so when a caller senses her desperation and inexperience and offers assistance, she’s tempted to agree. As soon as Sheriff Grayson Monroe meets the new waitress at his favorite diner, something about her strikes a familiar chord. When he sees her enter his lifestyle club, the desire to get to the bottom of her evasive eyes and answers to his probing questions takes hold.

In space, mutiny means death - that’s why Inspector General Park Yerim is taking her investigation so seriously. The alleged mutineer is Captain Nicolau Aames, whose command of the massive Earth-Mars vessel Aldrin has come under fire. The vast System Initiative says he disobeyed orders, but his crew swears he’s in the right. En route to Mars, Park gathers testimony from the Aldrin’s diverse crew, painting a complex picture of Aames’s character: his heroism, his failures, even his personal passions.

Since Zilan entered the world of royal alchemists, she has learned firsthand that alchemy comes at a price. She has lost her family and her beloved prince in her search for justice against the evil Empress. All Zilan wants now is to find some way to bring them back. Resurrection is her specialty, after all. In search of Penglai Island, where the infamous myth says life can be fully restored, Zilan starts a new adventure. But Penglai Island has been kept well hidden by a group of unpredictable, and often dangerous, alchemists.