Narrator

Paul Boehmer

Paul Boehmer
  • In this new collection, Ben Bova has compiled fourteen of his favorite short stories. Each story includes an all-new introduction with compelling insight into the narrative.

    Exploring the boundaries of the genre, Bova not only writes of spaceships, aliens, and time travel in most of his titles, but also speculates on the beginnings of science fiction in “Scheherazade and the Storytellers,” as well as the morality of man in “The Angel’s Gift.” Stories such as “The Café Coup” and “We’ll Always Have Paris” dip into speculative historical fiction, asking questions about what would happen if someone could change history for the better. This expansive collection is a key addition for Bova fans and sci-fi lovers alike!

    Stories included in this collection: “Monster Slayer,” “Muzhestvo,” “We’ll Always Have Paris,” “The Great Moon Hoax, or A Princess of Mars,” “Inspiration,” “Scheherazade and the Storytellers,” “The Supersonic Zeppelin,” “Mars Farts,” “The Man Who Hated Gravity,” “Sepulcher,” “The Café Coup,” “The Angel’s Gift,” “Waterbot,” and “Sam and the Flying Dutchman.”

  • From two acclaimed experts in the genre, a brand-new volume of supernatural stories showcasing the forgotten female horror writers from 1852–1923

    While the nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley may be hailed as the first modern writer of horror, the success of her immortal Frankenstein undoubtedly inspired dozens of female authors who wrote their own evocative, chilling tales.

    Weird Women, edited by award-winning anthologists Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger, collects some of the finest tales of terror by authors as legendary as Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, alongside works of writers who were the bestsellers and critical favorites of their time—Marie Corelli, Ellen Glasgow, Charlotte Riddell—and lesser known authors who are deserving of contemporary recognition.

    As railroads, industry, cities, and technology flourished in the mid-nineteenth century, so did stories exploring the horrors they unleashed. This anthology includes ghost stories and tales of haunted houses, as well as mad scientists, werewolves, ancient curses, mummies, psychological terrors, demonic dimensions, and even weird westerns.

    Curated by Klinger and Morton with an aim to present work that has languished in the shadows, all of these exceptional supernatural stories are sure to surprise, delight, and frighten today’s readers.

  • We burn them to ashes and then burn the ashes.

    In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, that’s the motto of the Firemen who hunted down and burned books wherever they found them. Bradbury warned of a world where our literary history is taken from us. In Burn the Ashes, some of the best science fiction authors working today continue to explore the dystopic worlds they introduced in Ignorance Is Strength.

    Edited by John Joseph Adams, Hugh Howey, and Christie Yant, the Dystopia Triptych is a series of three anthologies of dystopian fiction. Ignorance Is Strength—before the dystopia—focuses on society during its descent into absurdity and madness. Burn the Ashes—during the dystopia—turns its attention to life during the strangest, most dire times. Or Else the Light—after the dystopia—concludes the saga with each author sharing their own vision of how we as a society might crawl back from the precipice of despair.

    Burn the Ashes features all-new, never-before-published works by the following authors, in order of appearance: Carrie Vaughn, Tim Pratt, Rich Larson, Cadwell Turnbull, Karin Lowachee, Adam-Troy Castro, Caroline M. Yoachim, Hugh Howey, An Owomoyela, Seanan McGuire, Dominica Phetteplace, Alex Irvine, Tobias S. Buckell, Scott Sigler, Darcie Little Badger, Violet Allen, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor.

  • Into the darkness within; or else the light …

    When Margaret Atwood wrote these words, she left open the possibility that even our darkest tales may harbor a glimmer of hope. In Or Else the Light, the third and final entry in the Dystopia Triptych, over a dozen of the best minds in science fiction conclude their stories with a descent into darkness, or perhaps a ray of light.

    Edited by John Joseph Adams, Hugh Howey, and Christie Yant, the Dystopia Triptych is a series of three anthologies of dystopian fiction. Ignorance Is Strength—before the dystopia—focuses on society during its descent into absurdity and madness. Burn the Ashes—during the dystopia—turns its attention to life during the strangest, most dire times. Or Else the Light—after the dystopia—concludes the saga with each author sharing their own vision of how we as a society might crawl back from the precipice of despair.

    Or Else the Light features all-new, never-before-published works by the following authors, in order of appearance: Carrie Vaughn, Tim Pratt, Rich Larson, Cadwell Turnbull, Karin Lowachee, Adam-Troy Castro, Caroline M. Yoachim, Hugh Howey, An Owomoyela, Seanan McGuire, Dominica Phetteplace, Alex Irvine, Tobias S. Buckell, Scott Sigler, Darcie Little Badger, Violet Allen, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor.

  • War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

    George Orwell once wrote of a world where abuse of power begins with an abuse of language and a bastardization of truth. Some of today’s most exciting voices in speculative fiction explore the ramifications of those ideas in Ignorance Is Strength.

    The Dystopia Triptych is a series of three anthologies of dystopian fiction. Ignorance Is Strength—before the dystopia—focuses on society during its descent into absurdity and madness. Burn the Ashes—during the dystopia—turns its attention to life during the strangest, most dire times. Or Else the Light—after the dystopia—concludes the saga with each author sharing their own vision of how we as a society might crawl back from the precipice of despair.

    Ignorance Is Strength features all-new, never-before-published works by the following authors, in order of appearance: Carrie Vaughn, Tim Pratt, Rich Larson, Cadwell Turnbull, Karin Lowachee, Adam-Troy Castro, Caroline M. Yoachim, Hugh Howey, An Owomoyela, Seanan McGuire, Dominica Phetteplace, Alex Irvine, Tobias S. Buckell, Scott Sigler, Darcie Little Badger, Violet Allen, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor.

  • A historical sci-fi tale of the Land of the Blue Mountains 

    Best known for his masterpiece of horror, Dracula, Bram Stoker wrote a number of other novels and many short stories, all with supernatural themes or filled with a physical terror reminiscent of Poe. First published in 1909, The Lady of the Shroud is an engrossing concoction of an epic steampunk adventure, military tale, and science fiction romance. 

    Old Roger Melton has died, leaving behind one of the greatest fortunes in Europe. His arrogant relative Ernest Melton expects to be the heir, but, much to the family’s surprise, Roger leaves his vast estate to his obscure young nephew, Rupert Sent Leger. But Rupert’s newfound wealth comes with strange conditions attached, one of which is that he must inhabit the old castle of Vissarion in the remote Balkan nation known as the Land of the Blue Mountains. 

    Rupert, an intrepid adventurer, agrees and travels to Vissarion with his Aunt Janet, who possesses the occult power of Second Sight. But all is not as it seems at Vissarion. Rupert finds himself visited by a ghostly woman clothed in a burial shroud who sleeps in a tomb. Haunted by her strange beauty, he declares his love and they wed in an Orthodox ceremony conducted by candlelight. As a newly married couple, their trials and adventures continue. From sea battles with mechanical crabs and flying machines to insidious court plotters and spies, the newlyweds battle all manner of foe in their quest to free their country and become the ruling Voivodes of Vissarion, the Land of the Blue Mountains. 

  • The most spine-tingling suspense stories from the colonial era—including Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, and H. P. Lovecraft, and many more

    This stunning anthology of classic colonial suspense fiction plunges deep into the native soil from which American horror literature first sprang. While European writers of the Gothic and bizarre evoked ruined castles and crumbling abbeys, their American counterparts looked back to the colonial era’s stifling religion, and its dark and threatening woods.

    Today the best-known tale of colonial horror is Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, although Irving’s story is probably best known today from various movie versions it has inspired. Colonial horror tales of other prominent American authors—Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper among them—are overshadowed by their bestsellers, and are difficult to find in modern libraries. Many other pioneers of American horror fiction are presented afresh in this breathtaking volume for today’s public readers.

    Some will have heard the names of Increase and Cotton Mather in association with the Salem witch trials, but will not have sought out their contemporary accounts of what were viewed as supernatural events. By bringing these writers to the attention of the contemporary readers, this collection will help bring their names—and their work—back from the dead.

  • This masterful collection of seventeen classic mystery stories, dating from 1837 to 1914, traces the earliest history of popular detective fiction.

    Today, the figure of Sherlock Holmes towers over detective fiction like a colossus―but it was not always so. Edgar Allan Poe’s French detective Dupin, the hero of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” preceded Holmes’s deductive reasoning by more than forty years with his “tales of ratiocination.” In A Study in Scarlet, the first of Holmes’ adventures, Doyle acknowledged his debt to Poe―and to Émile Gaboriau, whose thief-turned-detective Monsieur Lecoq debuted in France twenty years earlier.

    If “Rue Morgue” was the first true detective story in English, the title of the first full-length detective novel is more hotly contested. Two books by Wilkie Collins―The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868)―are often given that honor, with the latter showing many of the features that came to identify the genre: a locked-room murder in an English country house; bungling local detectives outmatched by a brilliant amateur detective; a large cast of suspects and a plethora of red herrings; and a final twist before the truth is revealed. Others point to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent (1861) or Aurora Floyd (1862), and others still to The Notting Hill Mystery (1862–3) by the pseudonymous “Charles Felix.”

    As the early years of detective fiction gave way to two separate golden ages―of hard-boiled tales in America and intricately-plotted, so-called “cozy” murders in Britain―the legacy of Sherlock Holmes, with his fierce devotion to science and logic, gave way to street smarts on the one hand and social insight on the other―but even though these new sub-genres went their own ways, their detectives still required the intelligence and clear-sightedness that characterized the earliest works of detective fiction: the trademarks of Sherlock Holmes, and of all the detectives featured here.

  • Algernon Blackwood, a journalist and broadcast narrator, was one of the most prolific writers of ghost stories in the history of the genre. Included here are thirteen of his stories.

    The title story, “The Touch of Pan,” explores the lingering presence of myth in everyday life. In “The Glamour of the Snow,” Blackwood winds a tale about a man’s infatuation with a supernatural winter beauty. In “The Attic,” the ghost of an usurer haunts the old Chateaux and, on the anniversary of a young boy’s death, the boy’s cat brings the family together.

    “The Willows” follows two campers who are on a canoe trip down the Danube, with the sense of a looming threat following them. When darkness falls, they pick the wrong place to sleep for the night—a place where another dimension impinges on our own. American horror author H. P. Lovecraft considered “The Willows” to be the finest supernatural tale in English literature.

    Full contents:

    “The Touch of Pan,” read by Stefan Rudnicki
    “The Transfer,” read by Justine Eyre
    “The Occupant of the Room,” read by Paul Boehmer
    “The Valley of the Beasts,” read by Stefan Rudnicki
    “The Glamour of the Snow,” read by Paul Boehmer
    “The Pikestaff Case,” read by Kate Orsini
    “The Tryst,” read by Paul Boehmer
    “Wayfarers,” read by Stefan Rudnicki
    “The House of the Past,” read by Paul Boehmer
    “Initiation,” read by Stefan Rudnicki
    “The Wings of Horus,” read by Gabrielle de Cuir
    “The Attic,” read by Paul Boehmer
    “The Willows,” read by Stefan Rudnicki

  • It is almost impossible to envision what childhood would be like without the enchanting world of fairyland. Three-headed trolls, horses that carry their masters up mountains of glass, giants and dwarfs, monsters and magicians, fairies and ogres—these are the companions who will thrill young boys and girls of all lands and all times, as Andrew Lang’s phenomenally successful collections of stories have proved. From the day that they were first printed, the Lang fairy-tale books of many colors have entertained thousands of boys and girls, as they have also brought pleasure to the many parents who have read these unforgettable classics to their children.

    In addition to such familiar favorites as “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Rapunzel,” “The Ratcatcher” (“The Pied Piper”), and “Snowdrop” (“Snow White”), The Red Fairy Book contains a wonderful collection of lesser-known tales from French, German, Danish, Russian, and Romanian sources. A tale from Norse mythology recounts the old story of Sigurd and Brynhild; tales by the great Madame d’Aulnoy include “Graciosa and Percinet” and “Princess Rosette”; lesser-known tales from Grimm’s collection include “The Three Dwarfs,” “Mother Holle,” and “The Golden Goose.”

    All in all, this collection contains thirty-seven stories, all narrated in the clear, lively prose for which Lang was famous. Not only are Lang’s generally conceded to be the best English versions of standard stories, his collections are the richest and widest in range. His position as one of England’s foremost folklorists as well as his first-rate literary abilities makes his collections unmatchable in the English language.

  • The “fascinating, hair-raising, suspenseful” account of a little boy abducted in broad daylight and the desperate manhunt to find him (New York Times Book Review)

    On July 1, 1874, four-year-old Charley Ross and his older brother, Walter, were playing in front of their stately Philadelphia home when a horse-drawn carriage pulled up with two men who offered candy and fireworks if the boys would ride with them.

    Hours later, Walter came back, stating that they had ridden through the city until the men abandoned him in the street but kept Charley. Soon after, their father, Christian K. Ross, received a demand for $20,000 in return for his son.

    Ross went to the police for help—and before long, the case became a national phenomenon. A popular song pleaded for the boy’s safe return. The Philadelphia police searched every home in the city, and thousands of people falsely reported that they had seen Charley or knew his whereabouts. Meanwhile, the kidnappers’ ransom letters were becoming more threatening and bizarre. The press, eager to fan the flames of hysteria, printed wholly fabricated stories and even accused Christian Ross of orchestrating the whole thing in order to hide the fact that Charley was illegitimate.

    And then the men who took Charley went silent …

    This is the chilling true story of a crime that transfixed a still-growing America, the unlikely series of events that produced the case’s most tantalizing clues, and the tragic twist of fate that plunged the Ross family back into darkness and haunted them for decades to come.

    Originally published as Little Charley Ross

  • The third and final volume of the very best of Ben Bova, creator of the New York Times bestselling Grand Tour science fiction series, six-time Hugo award winner, and past president of the National Space Society—a grand master of science fiction storytelling. 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, that are as timeless as the stars.

  • 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.

  • In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians is a collection of twenty-six short stories originally published in 1909 detailing the lives of soldiers and civilians during the American Civil War. Ambrose Bierce’s stories about Civil War soldiers include

    • “A Horseman in the Sky,”
    • “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,”
    • “Chickamauga,”
    • “A Son of the Gods,”
    • “One of the Missing,”
    • “Killed at Resaca,”
    • “The Affair at Coulter’s Notch,”
    • “The Coup de Grâce,”
    • “Parker Adderson, Philosopher,”
    • “An Affair of Outposts,”
    • “The Story of a Conscience,”
    • “One Kind of Officer,”
    • “One Officer, One Man,”
    • “George Thurston,” and
    • “The Mocking-Bird.”

    Bierce’s stories about the lives of civilians during the Civil War period include

    • “The Man Out of the Nose,”
    • “An Adventure at Brownville,”
    • “The Famous Gilson Bequest,”
    • “The Applicant,”
    • “A Watcher by the Dead,”
    • “The Man and the Snake,”
    • “A Holy Terror,”
    • “The Suitable Surroundings,”
    • “The Boarded Window,”
    • “A Lady from Red Horse,” and
    • “The Eyes of the Panther.”

  • A chilling reenactment of the federal government’s anti-Communist investigations

    The testimony that Eric Bentley has gleaned for this book from the thirty-year record of the House Un-American Activities Committee focuses on HUAC’s treatment of artists, intellectuals, and performers. This highly dramatic and compelling collection of significant excerpts from the hearings shows with painful clarity how HUAC grew from a panel that investigated possible subversive activities in a “dignified” manner to a huge, unrelenting accusatory finger from which almost no one was safe. Thirty Years of Treason serves as a warning for the future and creates living history from the documentary record.

  • An exciting collection of SF stories by Hugo Award–winning author Ben Bova

    No matter what strange forms the future takes, says Ben Bova in his introduction, crime and criminals will always be with us—and with them, the need for law enforcement. Included in this collection of short stories are the full-length novel City of Darkness and "Brillo"—the famous collaboration between Bova and Harlan Ellison. 

  • Seventeen hard science fiction tales by today's top authors

    Hard science fiction is the literature of change, rigorously examining the impact—both beneficial and dangerous—of science and technology on humanity, the future, and the cosmos. As science advances, expanding our knowledge of the universe, astounding new frontiers in storytelling open up as well.

    In Carbide Tipped Pens, over a dozen of today's most creative imaginations explore these frontiers, carrying on the grand tradition of such legendary masters as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and John W. Campbell, while bringing hard science fiction into the twenty-first century by extrapolating from the latest scientific developments and discoveries. Ranging from ancient China to the outer reaches of the solar system, this outstanding collection of original stories, written by an international roster of authors, finds wonder, terror, and gripping human drama in topics as diverse as space exploration, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, climate change, alternate history, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, interplanetary war, and even the future of baseball.

    From tattoos that treat allergies to hazardous missions to Mars and beyond, from the end of the world to the farthest limits of human invention, Carbide Tipped Pens turns startling new ideas into state-of-the-art science fiction.

    This collection includes stories by Ben Bova, Gregory Benford, Robert Reed, Aliette de Bodard, Jack McDevitt, Howard Hendrix, Daniel H. Wilson, and many others!

  • A collection of horror stories by the iconic Charles Beaumont

    When The Hunger, and Other Stories first appeared in 1957, it heralded the arrival of Charles Beaumont as an important and highly original new voice in American fiction. Although he is best known today for his scripts for television and film, including several classic episodes of The Twilight Zone, Beaumont is being rediscovered as a master of weird tales, and this, his first published collection, contains some of his best. Ranging in tone from the chilling gothic horror of "Miss Gentilbelle," where an insane mother dresses her son up as a girl and slaughters his pets, to deliciously dark humor in tales like "Open House" and "The Infernal Bouillabaisse," where murderers' plans go disastrously awry, these seventeen stories demonstrate Beaumont's remarkable talent and versatility. 

  • New Frontiers offers fourteen startling visions of yesterday, today, and tomorrow from Ben Bova, six-time winner of the Hugo Award.

    Frontiers can be found in all directions—frontiers of time and space, as well as frontiers of courage, devotion, love, hate, and the outer limits of the human spirit. This outstanding collection of stories by one of science fiction's premier talents spans the length and breadth of history and the universe while exploring thought-provoking new ideas and dilemmas.

    From the Baghdad of The Arabian Nights to a vast interstellar empire thousands of years in the future, from the Vatican to a one-man vessel drifting in the vast emptiness of the asteroid belt, from virtual reality duels to the subtle intricacies of time travel and a golf tournament on the moon, here are tales of scoundrels and heroes, scientists and explorers, aliens and artificial intelligences, and even a young Albert Einstein. Each of them stands at the border of a new frontier and must venture out into unexplored territory—thanks to the limitless imagination of Ben Bova.

  • 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.

  • Famine, Death, War, and Pestilence—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the harbingers of Armageddon—these are our guides through the Wastelands.

    From the Book of Revelation to The Road Warrior, from A Canticle for Leibowitz to The Road, storytellers have long imagined the end of the world, weaving eschatological tales of catastrophe, chaos, and calamity. In doing so, these visionary authors have addressed one of the most challenging and enduring themes of imaginative fiction: the nature of life in the aftermath of total societal collapse.

    Gathering together the best postapocalyptic literature of the last two decades from many of today's most renowned authors of speculative fiction—including George R. R. Martin, Gene Wolfe, Orson Scott Card, Carol Emshwiller, Jonathan Lethem, Octavia E. Butler, and Stephen King—Wastelands explores the scientific, psychological, and philosophical questions of what it means to remain human in the wake of Armageddon. Whether the end of the world comes through nuclear war, ecological disaster, or cosmological cataclysm, these are tales of survivors, in some cases struggling to rebuild the society that was, in others, merely surviving, scrounging for food in depopulated ruins and defending themselves against monsters, mutants, and marauders.

    Wastelands delves into this bleak landscape, uncovering the raw human emotion and heart-pounding thrills at the genre's core.

  • For the oddball in you, flights into the sinister and fantastic

    The stories in this third collection from a master of speculative fiction are at once playful and dark, but each is wonderfully told.

    Contents include

    1. The Music of the Yellow Brass
    2. A Classic Affair
    3. The New People
    4. Buck Fever
    5. The Magic Man
    6. Father, Dear Father
    7. Perchance to Dream
    8. Song for a Lady
    9. The Trigger
    10. The Guests of Chance (with Chad Oliver)
    11. The Love-Master
    12. A Death in the Country
    13. The Neighbors
    14. The Howling Man
    15. Night Ride
  • Too long to be a short story, too short to be a novel—welcome to the surprisingly potent world of the novelette. The award-winning magazine Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show has been an online haven for this powerful form of storytelling since 2005. Now its editors have selected their all-time favorite science fiction novelettes from the magazine's eight-year history and reprinted them together in one big book of reading pleasure. Anything that is remotely possible—futures near and far, artificial intelligence and alien encounters, alternate timelines and alternate theories about creating universes, planet-eating black holes and lunar racetracks—is all here under the big tent of Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show.

    This anthology features stories by such award-winning authors as Orson Scott Card, Wayne Wightman, Aliette de Bodard, Eric James Stone, Mary Robinette Kowal, Stephen Kotowych, Jackie Gamber, Greg Siewert, Jamie Todd Rubin, Brad R. Torgersen, and Marina J. Lostetter, plus an all-new essay by Orson Scott Card about writing the character of Ender.

  • Enjoy the traditions of holidays past with this classic collection of fun and touching stories.

    • A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, read by John Mawson
    • Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus by Francis Pharcellus Church, read by Paul Boehmer
    • The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry, read by Paul Boehmer
    • ’Twas the Night before Christmas by Clement C. Moore, read by Gregory Itzin
    • Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Dogs by Eleanor Hallowell Abbott, read by Dana Green
    • The Tailor of Gloucester by Beatrix Potter, read by Jane Carr
    • Old Christmas by Washington Irving, read by Gregory Itzin
    • Christmas at Red Butte by L. M. Montgomery, read by Dana Green
    • The Christmas Surprise at Enderly Road by L. M. Montgomery, read by Paul Boehmer
  • In this provocative, gripping, and startling novel, bestselling author Ben Bova delivers a knockout read with his trademark blend of cutting-edge science and unrelenting suspense.

    Some see stem-cell research as mankind’s greatest scientific breakthrough; others, a blasphemous attempt to play God. Suddenly, the possibility of immortality exists. Two brothers, both doctors, stand on opposite sides of the controversy. To Arthur Marshak, his work is a momentous gift to humanity. To Jesse Marshak, it is a curse. And between them stands a beautiful, remarkable woman that both brothers will do anything to save.

    Somehow, before it’s too late, Arthur and Jesse must bridge the gap that divides them…on an issue that could mean nothing less than life or death for millions.

  • This second volume of Orson Scott Card's five-book anthology of short stories features seven tales exploring possible future scenarios for the human race.

    A Thousand Deaths
    In Soviet-occupied America, Jerry Crove is found guilty and convicted of knowing about the planned assassination of a Russian high official and not reporting it to the authorities. Instead of a forced confession and apology on television, he gives a speech on American freedom. His sentence is to be repeatedly put to death and brought back to life until he apologizes convincingly.

    Clap Hands and Sing
    An old man travels back in time to fall in love with a women he let get away.

    Dogwalker
    A man hacks into a government database using a system administrator's password. But getting the code right turns out to be very wrong.

    But We Try Not to Act like It
    A man complains to the television office that he cannot turn off his TV and that it—especially the soap operas—disturbs him in his attempts to read, his preferred activity. He's told that he'll be allowed to turn off the TV only if he changes his social status by making some friends or developing a sexual relationship.

    I Put My Blue Genes
    Earth, now an uninhabitable wasteland of biological warfare, is revisited by a contingent of humans who find a small band of "not-quite-human" beings still fighting an enemy that has long since been annihilated.

    In the Doghouse
    Aliens from a doomed planet relocate to Earth, having preserved only their intellectually superior minds. Forbidden by their moral code from killing another sentient being, they choose Earth's widely beloved dogs as their new vessels—but they soon find out what it means to "be in the doghouse."

    The Originist
    In this story set in Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe, a brilliant scientist working on a thorny problem is referred to the Galactic Library, an indexing project of astonishing breadth.

  • This third volume of Orson Scott Card's five-book anthology of short stories features ten fantasies and fables full of princesses and giants, bears and monkeys, magic and revelation. Discover the pitfalls of paradise, how to handle a dragon, the true secret of happiness, and much more. Card offers background commentaries for each story in a series of afterwords and introductions.

    Unaccompanied Sonata
    A musical child prodigy, raised alone in a cabin so that his only influences come from nature, plays a complicated instrument capable of a wide range of sound. Against his keepers' wishes, he is introduced to the music of Bach and is ejected from his musical Eden. As he strives to make music, his nemesis strives to stop him.

    A Cross-Country Trip to Kill Richard Nixon
    A young man blames all of America's problems on former president Richard Nixon.

    The Porcelain Salamander
    A curse can be lifted only once it is complete.

    Middle Woman
    An average woman—who is a middle child, of middle income, and living mid-way between her other two sisters—meets a cruel, trickster dragon on the road who grants her three wishes. Through wisdom and compassion, she is able to outsmart his trickery.

    The Bully and the Beast
    A giant hired as the king's bully falls hopelessly for the king's daughter, the most beautiful woman in the world.

    The Princess and the Bear
    A magic bear saves a princess' life twice: once from a wolf in the forest and once from her own husband.

    Sandmagic
    A young boy who watches his parents die vows to avenge their pain. This story is set in the Mithermages universe, which includes the story "Stonefather."

    The Best Day
    A woman rejects an old peddler's explanation that happiness is a matter of taking joy in overcoming the difficulties in life. Instead, she prefers to buy a traveling medicine man's elixir of happiness which promises that your best day will be with you forever. In reliving one happy day from her past she misses out on the rest of her life.

    A Plague of Butterflies
    Selfishly choosing to save his own life by not slaying a dragon, Amasa becomes involved in evil and allows it to flourish. Since it's too late to change matters, he must suffer eternal anguish knowing what he has done.

    The Monkeys Thought 'Twas All in Fun
    Paradise can have its hidden pitfalls.