Showing results by narrator "Jefferson Mays" in All Categories

Alone and un-tethered, feeling lost in the country he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks to a friendship with a charismatic and charming Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon, begins to reconnect with his life and his adopted country. Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure who is part idealist and part operator, introduces Hans to an "other" New York populated by immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality.

For the first time, all of the short fiction set in James S. A. Corey's New York Times best-selling Expanse series is available in this collection—including a brand-new novella.

Humanity has colonized the planets - interstellar travel is still beyond our reach, but the solar system has become a dense network of colonies. But there are tensions - the mineral-rich outer planets resent their dependence on Earth and Mars and the political and military clout they wield over the Belt and beyond. Now, when Captain Jim Holden's ice miner stumbles across a derelict, abandoned ship, he uncovers a secret that threatens to throw the entire system into war.

With so many excellent writing guides lining bookstore shelves, it can be hard to know where to look for the best advice. Should you go with Natalie Goldberg or Anne Lamott? Maybe William Zinsser or Stephen King would be more appropriate. Then again, what about the classics - Strunk and White, or even Aristotle himself? In Murder Your Darlings, Roy Peter Clark, who has been a beloved and revered writing teacher to children and Pulitzer Prize winners alike for more than 30 years, has compiled a remarkable collection of more than 100 of the best writing tips.

A neutral capital straddling Europe and Asia, Istanbul has spent the war as a magnet for refugees and spies. Even American businessman Leon Bauer has been drawn into this shadow world, doing undercover odd jobs and courier runs for the Allied war effort. Now, as the espionage community begins to pack up and an apprehensive city prepares for the grim realities of postwar life, he is given one more assignment, a routine job that goes fatally wrong, plunging him into a tangle of intrigue and moral confusion.

On the seedy side of Chicago nightlife in the 1930s, Joey Evans is a poor man's Bing Crosby - a big-talking small-time nightclub crooner down on his luck but always on the make. In slangy, error-littered letters signed "Pal Joey", he recounts his exploits with brash nightclub managers, shady business partners, and every pretty girl he meets. Charismatic yet conniving, Pal Joey is a smooth operator whose bravado and big ideas disguise a far less self-assured soul caught up in the rags-to-riches dream of the Jazz Age.

A thousand worlds have opened, and the greatest land rush in human history has begun. As wave after wave of colonists leave, the power structures of the old solar system begin to buckle. Ships are disappearing without a trace. Private armies are being secretly formed. The sole remaining protomolecule sample is stolen. Terrorist attacks previously considered impossible bring the inner planets to their knees. The sins of the past are returning to exact a terrible price.

A novella set in the hard-scrabble world of James S. A. Corey's NYT best-selling Expanse series, Strange Dogs follows a family of colonists on Laconia where a new generation of humanity struggles with the profound changes that come with making a home on an alien world. Like many before them, Cara and her family ventured through the gates as scientists and researchers, driven to carve out a new life and uncover the endless possibilities of the unexplored alien worlds now within reach.

At the height of WWII, five idealistic young Americans receive a mysterious letter from the OSS, asking them if they are willing to fight for their country. The men and women from very different backgrounds - a Texan athlete with German roots, an upper-crust son of a French mother and a wealthy businessman, a dirt-poor Midwestern fly fisherman, an orphaned fashion designer, and a ravishingly beautiful female fencer - all answer the call of duty, but each for a secret reason of his or her own. They bond immediately, in a group code-named Dragonfly.

In the thousand-sun network of humanity's expansion, new colony worlds are struggling to find their way. Every new planet lives on a knife-edge between collapse and wonder, and the crew of the aging gunship, Rocinante, have their hands more than full keeping the fragile peace. In the vast space between Earth and Jupiter, the inner planets and the Belt have formed a tentative and uncertain alliance still haunted by a history of wars and prejudices.

A revolution brewing for generations has begun in fire. It will end in blood. The Free Navy - a violent group of Belters in black-market military ships - has crippled the Earth and begun a campaign of piracy and violence among the outer planets. The colony ships heading for the 1,000 new worlds on the far side of the alien ring gates are easy prey, and no single navy remains strong enough to protect them. James Holden and his crew know the strengths and weaknesses of this new force better than anyone.

In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized America's imagination. A "spirit photographer", William Mumler took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of a lost loved one alongside the living subject. Mumler was a sensation. Peter Manseau brilliantly captures a nation wracked with grief and hungry for proof of the existence of ghosts and for contact with their dead husbands and sons. It took a circus-like trial of Mumler on fraud charges to expose a fault line of doubt and manipulation.

Gates Foster lost his daughter, Lucy, 17 years ago. He's never stopped searching. Suddenly, a shocking new development provides Foster with his first major lead in over a decade, and he may finally be on the verge of discovering the awful truth. Meanwhile, Mitzi Ives has carved out a space among the Foley artists creating the immersive sounds giving Hollywood films their authenticity. Using the same secret techniques as her father before her, she's become an industry-leading expert in the sound of violence and horror, creating screams so bone-chilling, they may as well be real.

Savaged by critics for its supposed profanity and obscenity and bought in large numbers by readers eager to see whether it lived up to its lurid reputation, The Monk became a success due to scandal when it was published in 1796 - not least because its author was a member of parliament and only 20 years old.

For generations the solar system--Mars, the moon, the asteroid belt--was humanity's great frontier. Until now. The alien artefact working through its program under the clouds of Venus has emerged to build a massive structure outside the orbit of Uranus: a gate that leads into a starless dark. Jim Holden and the crew of the Rocinante are part of a vast flotilla of scientific and military ships going out to examine the artefact. But behind the scenes, a complex plot is unfolding, with the destruction of Holden at its core.

In his first novel, A Happy Death, written when he was in his early 20s and retrieved from his private papers following his death in 1960, Albert Camus laid the foundation for The Stranger, focusing in both works on an Algerian clerk who kills a man in cold blood. But he also revealed himself to an extent that he never would in his later fiction. For if A Happy Death is the study of a rule-bound being shattering the fetters of his existence, it is also a remarkably candid portrait of its author as a young man.

Having travelled back in time to Victorian-era New York City to save her siblings, Constance Greene confronts Manhattan’s most dangerous serial killer, Dr. Leng, but she is betrayed and left incandescent with rage. Agent Pendergast is determined to assist Constance, who is now on a fanatical quest for vengeance. And Diogenes, Pendergast's brother, also takes a trip out of his own time, offering to help the duo for unexplained reasons of his own.

The final novella set in the universe of James S. A. Corey's NYT-bestselling Expanse series. Now a Prime Original series. This story will be available in the complete Expanse story collection, Memory's Legion.

Blending reality and illusion with elegance and precision, the stories in this collection - one of Calvino’s earliest - take place in a World War II era and postwar Italy tinged with the visionary and fablelike qualities that would come to define this master storyteller’s later style. A trio of gluttonous burglars invade a pastry shop; two children trespass upon a forbidden garden; a wealthy family invites a rustic goatherd to lunch, only to mock him.

Jason Taverner has a glittering TV career, millions of fans, great wealth and something close to eternal youth. He is one of a handful of brilliant, beautiful people, the product of top-secret government experiments forty years earlier. But suddenly, all records of him vanish. He becomes a man with no identity, in a police state where everyone us closely monitored. Can he ever be rich and famous again? Or was that life just an illusion?