“Finding danger and humanity in their characters, the short stories of Boys, Beasts and Men marry emotional epiphanies with violence, resulting in imaginative, stirring meditations on LGBTQ+ struggles and acceptance.” —Foreword (starred review)
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- Out There
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Edited by Saundra Mitchell
Read by Sarah Beth Pfeifer, Vikas Adam, Carolina Hoyos, Shayna Small, Em Grosland, Krystal Hammond, Daniel Henning, and Kyle Rocco East
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Release Date: 12/20/22
Formats: Digital Audy
Into the queer new yonder!
To conclude the trio of anthologies that started with critically acclaimed All Out and Out Now, Out There features seventeen original short stories set in the future from fantastic queer YA authors.
Explore new and familiar worlds where the human consciousness can be uploaded into a body on Mars … an alien helps a girl decide if she should tell her best friend how she feels … two teens get stuck in a time loop at a space station … people are forced to travel to the past or the future to escape the dying planet … only a non-binary person can translate the binary code of a machine that predicts the future … everyone in the world vanishes except for two teen girls who are in love.
This essential and beautifully written collection immerses and surprises with each turn of the page.
With original stories from: Ugochi M. Agoawike, K. Ancrum, Kalynn Bayron, Z Brewer, Mason Deaver, Alechia Dow, Z.R. Ellor, Leah Johnson, Naomi Kanakia, Claire Kann, Alex London, Jim McCarthy, Abdi Nazemian, Emma K. Ohland, Adam Sass, Mato J. Steger, and Nita Tyndall.
- Out There
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Edited by Saundra Mitchell
Read by Sarah Beth Pfeifer, Vikas Adam, Carolina Hoyos, Shayna Small, Em Grosland, Krystal Hammond, Daniel Henning, and Kyle Rocco East
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Release Date: 12/20/22
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Boys, Beasts & Men
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Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 9/06/22
Formats: Digital Audy
In Nebula Award–winning author Sam J. Miller’s devastating debut short-fiction collection—featuring an introduction by Amal El-Mohtar—queer infatuation, inevitable heartbreak, and brutal revenge seamlessly intertwine. Whether innocent, guilty, or not even human, the boys, beasts, and men roaming through Miller’s gorgeously crafted worlds can destroy listeners, yet leave them wanting more.
Despite his ability to control the ambient digital cloud, a foster teen falls for a clever con-man. Luring bullies to a quarry, a boy takes clearly enumerated revenge through unnatural powers of suggestion. In the aftermath of a shapeshifting alien invasion, a survivor fears that he brought something out of the Arctic to infect the rest of the world. A rebellious group of queer artists create a new identity that transcends even the anonymity of death.
Sam J. Miller shows his savage wit, unrelenting candor, and lush imagery in this essential career retrospective collection, taking his place alongside legends of the short-fiction form such as Carmen Maria Machado, Carson McCullers, and Jeff VanderMeer.
- Boys, Beasts & Men
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Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 9/06/22
Formats: Digital Audy
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- At the End of the Century
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Introduction by Anita Desai
Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 5/28/19
Formats: Digital Audy
Multilayered, subtle, insightful short stories from the inimitable Booker Prize–winning author
Nobody has written so powerfully of the relationship between and within India and the Western middle classes than Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. In this selection of stories, chosen by her surviving family, her ability to tenderly and humorously view the situations faced by three (sometimes interacting) cultures―European, post-Independence Indian, and American―is never more acute.
In “A Course of English Studies,” a young woman arrives at Oxford from India and struggles to adapt, not only to the sad, stoic object of her infatuation but also to a country that seems so resistant to passion and color. In the wrenching “Expiation,” the blind, unconditional love of a cloth-shop owner for his wastrel younger brother exposes the tragic beauty and foolishness of human compassion and faith. The wry and triumphant “Pagans” brings us middle-aged sisters Brigitte and Frankie in Los Angeles, who discover a youthful sexuality in the company of the languid and handsome young Indian, Shoki. This collection also includes Jhabvala’s last story, “The Judge’s Will,” which appeared in the New Yorker in 2013 after her death.
The profound inner experience of both men and women is at the center of Jhabvala’s writing: she rivals Jane Austen with her impeccable powers of observation. With an introduction by her friend, the writer Anita Desai, At the End of the Century celebrates a writer’s astonishing lifetime gift for language and leaves us with no doubt of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s unique place in modern literature.
- At the End of the Century
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Introduction by Anita Desai
Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 5/28/19
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Nightwatchman’s Occurrence Book, and Other Comic Inventions
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Read by Simon Vance, Ron Butler, and Vikas Adam
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Release Date: 12/24/18
Formats: Digital Audy
V. S. Naipaul’s legendary command of broad comedy and acute social observation is on abundant display in these classic works of fiction—two novels and a collection of stories—that capture the rhythms of life in the Caribbean and England with impressive subtlety and humor.
The Suffrage of Elvira is Naipaul’s hilarious take on an electoral campaign in the back country of Trinidad, where the candidates’ tactics include blatant vote-buying and supernatural sabotage. The eponymous protagonist of Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion is an aging Englishman of ponderously regular habits whose life is thrown into upheaval by a sudden marriage and unanticipated professional advancement. And the stories in A Flag on the Island take us from a Chinese bakery in Trinidad—whose black proprietor faces bankruptcy until he takes a Chinese name—to a rooming house in London—where the genteel landlady plays a nasty Darwinian game with her budgerigars.
Unfailingly stylish, filled with intelligence and feeling, here is the work of a writer who can do just about anything that can be done with language.
- The Nightwatchman’s Occurrence Book, and Other Comic Inventions
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Read by Simon Vance, Ron Butler, and Vikas Adam
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Release Date: 12/24/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Voices of a People’s History of the United States, 10th Anniversary Edition
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By Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove
Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 10/02/18
Formats: Digital Audy
Selected testimonies to living history—speeches, letters, poems, songs—offered by the people who make history happen, but are often left out of history books: women, workers, nonwhites. Featuring introductions to the original texts by Howard Zinn.
New voices featured in this 10th Anniversary Edition include Chelsea Manning, speaking after her thirty-five-year prison sentence; Naomi Klein, speaking from the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Liberty Square; a member of Dream Defenders, a youth organization that confronts systemic racial inequality; members of the Undocumented Youth movement, who occupied, marched, and demonstrated in support of the DREAM Act; a member of the Day Laborers movement; Chicago Teachers Union strikers; and several critics of the Obama administration, including Glenn Greenwald, on governmental secrecy.
- Voices of a People’s History of the United States, 10th Anniversary Edition
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By Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove
Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 10/02/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- In a Free State
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Read by Simon Vance, Vikas Adam, and Neil Shah
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Release Date: 5/08/18
Formats: Digital Audy
No writer has rendered our boundaryless, postcolonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. A perfect case in point is this riveting novel, a masterful and stylishly rendered narrative of emigration, dislocation, and dread, accompanied by four supporting narratives.
On a road trip through Africa, two English people—Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys; and Linda, a supercilious “compound wife”—are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin’s Uganda. And the farther Naipaul’s protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims. Alongside this Conradian tour de force are four incisive portraits of men seeking liberation far from home.
By turns funny and terrifying, sorrowful and unsparing, In a Free State is Naipaul at his best.
- In a Free State
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Read by Simon Vance, Vikas Adam, and Neil Shah
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Release Date: 5/08/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Best of Bova, Vol. 2
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By Ben Bova
Introduction read by Ben Bova
Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 2/01/17
Formats: Digital Audy
The second volume of the best stories from legendary hard science fiction writer Ben Bova, the creator of the New York Times bestselling Grand Tour science fiction series, a six-time Hugo award winner, and past president of the National Space Society.
The stories included in this volume span the five decades of Bova’s incandescent career at the center of science fiction and space advocacy.
Here are tales of star-faring adventure, peril, and drama. Here are journeys into the mind-bending landscapes of virtual worlds and alternate realities. Here you’ll also find stories of humanity’s astounding future on Earth, on Mars, and in the Solar System beyond—stories that always get the science right. And Bova’s gathering of deeply realized, totally human characters are the heroic, brave, tricky, sometimes dastardly engineers, astronauts, corporate magnates, politicians, and scientists who will make these futures possible—and those who often find that the problems of tomorrow are always linked to human values, and human failings, that are as timeless as the stars.
- The Best of Bova, Vol. 2
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By Ben Bova
Introduction read by Ben Bova
Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 2/01/17
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Best of Bova, Vol. 1
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By Ben Bova
Introductions read by Ben Bova
Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 2/02/16
Formats: Digital Audy
The first volume in a sterling collection of stories from legendary hard science fiction master Ben Bova
These are selected stories from Bova’s amazing career at the center of science fiction and space advocacy. He is the creator of the New York Times bestselling Grand Tour series, a six-time Hugo Award winner, and past president of the National Space Society. The very best of Ben Bova, these stories span the five decades of Bova’s incandescent career.
Here are tales of star-faring adventure, peril, and drama. Here are journeys into the mind-bending landscapes of virtual worlds and alternate realities. Here you’ll also find stories of humanity’s astounding future on Earth, on Mars, and in the solar system beyond—stories that always get the science right. And Bova’s gathering of deeply realized, totally human characters are the heroic, brave, tricky, sometimes dastardly engineers, astronauts, corporate magnates, politicians, and scientists who will make these futures possible—and those who often find that the problems of tomorrow are always linked to human values and human failings which are as timeless as the stars.
- The Best of Bova, Vol. 1
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By Ben Bova
Introductions read by Ben Bova
Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 2/02/16
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Far Futures
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Edited by Gregory Benford
Stories by Greg Bear, Poul Anderson, Donald Kingsbury, Joe Haldeman, and Charles Sheffield
Directed by Claire Bloom and Judy Young
Read by Vikas Adam, Paul Boehmer, Susan Hanfield, Alex Hyde-White, and Stefan Rudnicki
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Release Date: 6/17/14
Formats: Digital Audy
Five novellas of hard science fiction by five modern masters of the form
From Nebula Award winner Gregory Benford comes this ambitious hard SF anthology that collects five original novellas. Each one takes the very long view—all are set at least ten thousand years in the future. The authors take a rigorously scientific view of such grand panoramas, confronting the largest issues of cosmology, astronomy, evolution, and biology.
The last moments of a universe beseiged occupy Greg Bear's Judgment Engine. Can something human matter at the very end of creation, as contorted matter ceases to have meaning and time itself stutters to an eerie halt?
Genesis by Poul Anderson is set a billion years ahead, when humanity has become extinct. Earth is threatened by the slowly warming sun, and vast machine intelligences decide to recreate humans.
Donald Kingsbury contributes Historical Crisis, a starting work on the prediction of the human future that challenges the foundations of psychohistory, as developed in Isaac Asimov's famous Foundation Trilogy.
Joe Haldeman's For White Hill confronts humanity with hostile aliens who remorselessly grind down every defense against them. A lone artist struggles to find a place in this distant, wondrous future when humanity seems doomed.
In At the Eschaton by Charles Sheffield, a man tries to rescue his dying wife from oblivion by hurling himself forward, in both space and time, to the very end of the universe itself.
- Far Futures
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Edited by Gregory Benford
Stories by Greg Bear, Poul Anderson, Donald Kingsbury, Joe Haldeman, and Charles Sheffield
Directed by Claire Bloom and Judy Young
Read by Vikas Adam, Paul Boehmer, Susan Hanfield, Alex Hyde-White, and Stefan Rudnicki
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Release Date: 6/17/14
Formats: Digital Audy