“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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- 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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- Hardwired
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By Robert S. Barrett, PhD, and Louis Hugo Francescutti, MD, PhD
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 9/07/21
Formats: Digital Audy
For the first time in a thousand years, Americans are experiencing a reversal in lifespan. Despite living in one of the safest and most secure eras in human history, one in five adults suffers from anxiety as does one-third of adolescents. Nearly half of the US population is overweight or obese and one-third of Americans suffer from chronic pain—the highest level in the world. In the United States, fatalities due to prescription pain medications now surpass those of heroin and cocaine combined, and each year ten percent of all students on American college campuses contemplate suicide. With the proliferation of social media and the algorithms for social sharing that prey upon our emotional brains, inaccurate or misleading health articles and videos now move faster through social media networks than do reputable ones.
This audiobook is about modern health—or lack of it. The authors make two key arguments: that our deteriorating wellness is rapidly becoming a health emergency, and two, that much of these trends are rooted in the way our highly evolved hardwired brains and bodies deal with modern social change. The coauthors: a PhD from the world of social science and an MD from the world of medicine—combine forces to bring this emerging human crisis to light. Densely packed with fascinating facts and little-told stories, the authors weave together real-life cases that describe how our ancient evolutionary drives are propelling us toward ill health and disease. Over the course of seven chapters, the authors unlock the mysteries of our top health vices: why hospitals are more dangerous than warzones, our addiction to sugar, salt, and stress, our emotionally-driven brains, our relentless pursuit of happiness, our sleepless society, our understanding of risk, and finally, how world history can be a valuable tutor. Through these varied themes, the authors illustrate how our social lives are more of a determinant of health outcome than at any other time in our history, and to truly understand our plight, we need to recognize when our decisions and behavior are being directed by our survival-seeking hardwired brains and bodies.
- Hardwired
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By Robert S. Barrett, PhD, and Louis Hugo Francescutti, MD, PhD
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 9/07/21
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Voyage
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 6/29/21
Formats: Digital Audy
The space mission of a lifetime
An epic saga of America’s might-have-been, Voyage is a powerful, sweeping novel of how, if President Kennedy had lived, we could have sent a manned mission to Mars in the 1980s. Imaginatively created from the true lives and real events, Voyage returns to the geniuses of NASA and the excitement of the Saturn rocket, and includes historical figures from Neil Armstrong to Ronald Reagan who are interwoven with unforgettable characters whose dreams mirror the promise of a young space program that held the world in thrall. There is: Dana, the Nazi camp survivor who achieves the dream of his hated masters; Gershon, the Vietnam fighter jock determined to be the first African American to land on another planet; and Natalie York, the brilliant geologist/astronaut who risks a career and love for the chance to run her fingers through the soil of another world.
- Voyage
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 6/29/21
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Apollo 1
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 5/11/21
Formats: Digital Audy
On January 27, 1967, astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee climbed into a new spacecraft perched atop a large Saturn rocket at Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a routine dress rehearsal of their upcoming launch into orbit, then less than a month away. All three astronauts were experienced pilots and had dreams of one day walking on the moon, but little did they know, nor did anyone else, that once they entered the spacecraft that cold winter day they would never leave it alive. The Apollo program would be perilously close to failure before it ever got off the ground.
But rather than dooming the space program, this tragedy caused the spacecraft to be completely overhauled, creating a stellar flying machine to achieve the program’s primary goal: putting man on the moon.
Apollo 1 is a candid portrayal of the astronauts, the disaster that killed them, and its aftermath. In it, listeners will learn
- how the Apollo 1 spacecraft was doomed from the start, with miles of uninsulated wiring and tons of flammable materials in a pure oxygen atmosphere, along with a hatch that wouldn’t open;
- how, due to political pressure, the government contract to build the Apollo 1 craft went to a bidder with an inferior plan; and
- how public opinion polls were beginning to turn against the space program before the tragedy and got much worse after.
Apollo 1 is about America fulfilling its destiny of man setting foot on the moon. It’s also about the three American heroes who lost their lives in the tragedy, but whose lives were not lost in vain.
- Apollo 1
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 5/11/21
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Paradise Affair
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Read by Kevin Kenerly and Erica Sullivan
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Release Date: 1/26/21
Formats: Digital Audy
From Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Bill Pronzini comes this historical mystery, The Paradise Affair.
Quincannon’s pursuit of two con men who have absconded to Hawaii with a considerable sum of his employer’s assets dovetails nicely with Sabina’s vision of a second honeymoon. But neither is wont to stay out of trouble, and Sabina inadvertently becomes involved in a locked room murder involving a dying message in Honolulu.
- The Paradise Affair
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Read by Kevin Kenerly and Erica Sullivan
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Release Date: 1/26/21
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Overnight Code
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By Paige Bowers and David R. Montague
Read by Robin Eller and Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 1/12/21
Formats: Digital Audy
Overnight Code tells the story of Raye Montague, an ambitious African American woman from segregated Little Rock, Arkansas, who spent a lifetime educating herself, both inside and outside of the classroom, so that she could become the person and professional she aspired to be. Where some saw roadblocks, Montague only saw hurdles that needed to be overcome. Her mindset helped her become the first person to draft a Naval ship design by computer, using a program she worked late nights to debug. She did this as a single mother during the height of the Cold War, all the while imbuing her son with the hard-won wisdom she had accumulated throughout the years.
Equal parts coming-of-age tale, civil rights history, and reflection on the power of education, Overnight Code is a tale about the persistence and perseverance required to forge the life of your dreams when the odds against you seem insurmountable, showing how one woman refused to let other people’s prejudices stand in the way of her success.
- Overnight Code
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By Paige Bowers and David R. Montague
Read by Robin Eller and Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 1/12/21
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Postman
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By David Brin
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 12/08/20
Formats: Digital Audy
He was a survivor—a wanderer who traded tales for food and shelter in the dark and savage aftermath of a devastating war.
Fate touches him one chill winter’s day when he borrows the jacket of a long-dead postal worker to protect himself from the cold. The old, worn uniform still has power as a symbol of hope, and with it he begins to weave his greatest tale, of a nation on the road to recovery.
This is the story of a lie that became the most powerful kind of truth. A timeless novel as urgently compelling as War Day or Alas, Babylon, David Brin’s The Postman is the dramatically moving saga of a man who rekindled the spirit of America through the power of a dream, from a modern master of science fiction.
- The Postman
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By David Brin
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 12/08/20
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Two Worlds and In Between
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Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 6/30/20
Formats: Digital Audy
Two Worlds and in Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan presents a stunning retrospective of the first ten years of the author’s work. It is a compilation of more than 200,000 words of short fiction, including many of her most acclaimed stories as well as some of the author’s personal favorites; several previously uncollected, hard-to-find pieces; her sci-fi novella, The Dry Salvages; and a rare collaboration with Poppy Z. Brite.
- Two Worlds and In Between
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Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 6/30/20
Formats: Digital Audy
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- EndoMEtriosis
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Foreword by Alaia Baldwin Aronow
Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 3/17/20
Formats: Digital Audy
Endometriosis is a physically and mentally debilitating disease that has tortured women for centuries. It currently affects 176 million women of childbearing age worldwide, including one in ten in the US. Despite those startling statistics, this horrific and incurable ailment is still relatively unknown to the general population and medical professionals alike.
Symptoms of heavy periods and excruciating pain most often begin in middle school or high school, yet doctors take an average of twelve years to diagnose it in a patient. As a result, these undiagnosed and misdiagnosed women suffer into at least their mid-twenties or early thirties, repeatedly told that the pain is in their minds, that it’s simply part of becoming a woman, or that it’s caused by some other disease or condition. That nonsense must stop, and it must stop now!
This guide will explain what endo is in terms that adolescents can understand, along with potential remedies, treatments to avoid, and how to manage the psychological and social effects of the disease. It will also include riveting stories from women in their teens and mid-twenties, and from those closest to them such as mothers, fathers, teachers, and coaches.
One of the most terrifying aspects of having endo is feeling like nobody believes the pain is real or severe, which can cause a woman to feel scared, isolated, and depressed. This guide will fully arm her with the truth and knowledge about the disease so that she can overcome her fears and confidently advocate for herself. If her cry for help has been dismissed by anyone, she will be able to educate them so that they can empathize with her and fully support her in her quest for healing.
- EndoMEtriosis
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Foreword by Alaia Baldwin Aronow
Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 3/17/20
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Hungry Blade
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 1/21/20
Formats: Digital Audy
The new, fast-paced, WWII-era spy thriller from the author of New York Station
Forty modern masterpieces are found concealed on a neutral ship in international waters sixteen months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Their provenance is sketchy and their final destination unknown. The Royal Navy suspects the works are “degenerate art” seized by the Nazis and shipped across the Atlantic to create cash for their covert operations. But how to prove it?
There’s only one man for the job—Roy Hawkins. The British Secret Intelligence Service has put their half-American star agent in tough spots before and he’s always come out on top. But this time Hawkins is headed to Mexico, where the vibrant art scene and tight-knit German expatriate community obscure the paintings’ ultimate purpose. As he tracks the art from Veracruz to Mexico City, Hawkins struggles to see the Nazis’ endgame. For the first time, he doesn’t speak the language and he doesn’t know the players—but he does know how to fight Fascists. Problem is, in the “get along and go along” culture of wartime profiteering, distinguishing between the true believers and the opportunists is no easy task.
Can Hawkins untangle the false leads and double crosses before the Nazis realize their sinister plan?
- The Hungry Blade
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 1/21/20
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Hynek UFO Report
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Foreword compiled by Paul Hynek
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 1/01/20
Formats: Digital Audy
Originally released in 1977, this new edition by the world’s foremost authority distills 12,000 “sightings” and 140,000 pages of Project Blue Book “evidence” into a coherent explanation. A US Air Force–sponsored UFO-basher for years, Hynek had completely changed his tune by the late 1960s. Whether you believe in little green men or an official government cover-up policy, The Hynek UFO Report is a must-read for your own analysis.
- Have UFOs really been reported by every nation across the globe?
- Can all the eyewitness reports simply be fantasy?
- Are we victims of mass hallucination or just plain lies?
- Have close encounters actually occurred?
- Is the government concealing deep secrets at a hidden location?
The Hynek UFO Report is rational, logical, and realistic. It is for anyone interested in UFOs, the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and the role of the US government in hiding the truth from the public.
- The Hynek UFO Report
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Foreword compiled by Paul Hynek
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 1/01/20
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Grace
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By Howard Owen
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 11/12/19
Formats: Digital Audy
Life is cheap on the poor side of town. For more than two decades, young black kids have been disappearing from Richmond’s East End. No bodies have ever been found, and the missing boys haven’t received much attention from police or the media. When the uncle of the latest missing kid takes matters into his own hands and holds the daily newspaper’s publisher hostage in the paper’s lobby, Willie Black gets involved, and things start to change.
The world’s oldest night cops reporter knows something about the inequities of race and income. When Sam McNish, a crusader for social justice who grew up in the same hardscrabble Oregon Hill neighborhood as Willie, is arrested shortly after a child’s body is discovered, the police start making the case that McNish has been the demonic force behind all the boys’ disappearances.
Willie, after working the traps he’s developed from his too-many years as a reporter, isn’t so sure.
As Willie teases out the real story, he manages to antagonize his publisher and the city’s power structure as well as police chief L.D. Jones, but experience has taught him that the more people he angers, the closer he probably is to the truth. Along the way, he forms a strange alliance with Big Boy Sunday, a dangerous man who exhibits a strong interest in seeing that Willie finds the truth—although Willie will learn that Big Boy wants parts of that truth to remain hidden.
- Grace
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By Howard Owen
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 11/12/19
Formats: Digital Audy
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- A Better Planet
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Foreword by Ingrid C. Burke
Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 10/22/19
Formats: Digital Audy
A practical, bipartisan call to action from the world’s leading thinkers on the environment and sustainability
Sustainability has emerged as a global priority over the past several years. The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change and the adoption of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals through the United Nations have highlighted the need to address critical challenges, like the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, water shortages, and air pollution. But in the United States, partisan divides, regional disputes, and deep disagreements over core principles have made it nearly impossible to chart a course toward a sustainable future.
This timely new book, edited by celebrated scholar Daniel C. Esty, offers fresh thinking and forward-looking solutions from environmental thought leaders across the political spectrum. The book’s forty essays cover such subjects as ecology, environmental justice, Big Data, public health, and climate change, all with an emphasis on sustainability. This book focuses on moving toward sustainability through actionable, bipartisan approaches based on rigorous analytical research.
- A Better Planet
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Foreword by Ingrid C. Burke
Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 10/22/19
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Apple, Tree
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Edited and with an introduction by Lise Funderburg
Essays by various authors
Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 9/24/19
Formats: Digital Audy
It happens to us all: we think we’ve settled into an identity, a self, and then out of nowhere and with great force, the traces of our parents appear to us, in us—in mirrors, in gestures, in reaction and reactivity, at weddings and funerals, and in troubled thoughts that crouch in dark corners of our minds.
In this masterful collection of new essays, the apple looks at the tree. Twenty-five writers deftly explore a trait they’ve inherited from a parent, reflecting on how it affects the lives they lead today—how it shifts their relationship to that parent (sometimes posthumously) and to their sense of self.
Apple, Tree’s all-star lineup of writers brings eloquence, integrity, and humor to topics such as arrogance, obsession, psychics, grudges, table manners, luck, and laundry. Contributors include Laura van den Berg, S. Bear Bergman, John Freeman, Jane Hamilton, Mat Johnson, Daniel Mendelsohn, Kyoko Mori, Ann Patchett, and Sallie Tisdale, among others. Together, their pieces form a prismatic meditation on how we make fresh sense of ourselves and our parents when we see the pieces of them that live on in us.
- Apple, Tree
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Edited and with an introduction by Lise Funderburg
Essays by various authors
Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 9/24/19
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The CIA UFO Papers
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By Dan Wright
Foreword by Jan Harzan
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 9/01/19
Formats: Digital Audy
Here are the secret CIA papers that prove that the government has been tracking UFOs and extraterrestrials for over fifty years.
In autumn 2016, the CIA sent to its website a cache of electronic files previously released under the Freedom of Information Act but housed at the National Archives. Among a variety of subjects were “unidentified flying objects.” Finally, a stockpile of reports and correspondences were available for serious UFO researchers to examine at home.
This book consists of selections from those secret files. Dan Wright spent eighteen months selecting, editing, and organizing the 550 files that are relevant to UFO research and has produced a chronological collection of CIA documents spanning 1949 to 2000.
Each chapter focuses on a particular year. The summary of documents for each year is followed by a section called “While You Were away from Your Desk,” which provides historical and cultural context for the document summaries and examines other sightings and contacts that are not mentioned in the CIA files.
Among the fascinating tidbits are
- A memo to J. Edgar Hoover about flying saucer reports and
- The 1949 conference at Los Alamos that included Edward Teller, upper atmosphere physicist Dr. Joseph Kaplan, and other renowned scientists in which the participants debated whether recent incidents were natural phenomena or UFO sightings.
This is a must-have book for those fascinated by the history of UFO sightings and those interested in government secrets and cover-ups.
- The CIA UFO Papers
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By Dan Wright
Foreword by Jan Harzan
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 9/01/19
Formats: Digital Audy
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- This City Is Killing Me
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 8/06/19
Formats: Digital Audy
When Jonathan Foiles was a graduate student in social work, he had to choose between a mental health or policy track. But once he began working, he found it impossible to tell the two apart. While helping poor patients from the south side and west side of Chicago, he realized that individual therapy could not take into account the importance of unemployment, poverty, lack of affordable housing, and other policy decisions that impact the well-being of both individuals and communities.
It is easy to be depressed if you live in a neighborhood that has few supportive resources available or is marred by gun violence. We are able to diagnose people with depression, but how does one heal a neighborhood?
This City Is Killing Me brings policy and psychology together. Through case studies, Foiles opens up his therapy door to allow us to overhear the stories of individual poor Chicagoans. As we listen, Foiles teaches us how he makes diagnoses, explains how therapists before him would analyze these patients, and, through statistics and the example of Chicago, teaches us how policy decisions have contributed to these individuals’ suffering. The result is a remarkable, unique work with an urgent political call to action at its core.
- This City Is Killing Me
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 8/06/19
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Rift
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 5/28/19
Formats: Digital Audy
Fast-paced and terrifyingly real, The Rift is a blockbuster novel of destruction, heroism, and survival that is sure to grab fans of recent disaster movies.
It starts with the dogs. They won’t stop barking. And then the earth shrugs—8.9 on the Richter scale. It’s the world’s biggest earthquake since Lisbon in 1755, and it doesn’t hit California or Japan or Mexico, but New Madrid, Missouri, a sleepy town on the Mississippi River. Seismologists had predicted the scope of the disaster—but no one listened.
For hundreds of miles around, dams burst, engulfing entire counties in tidal waves of mud and debris. Cities collapse into piles of brick and shards of glass. Hospitals and schools crumble. Bridges twist and snap, spilling rush-hour traffic into rivers already swollen with bodies. Within minutes, there is nothing but chaos and ruin from St. Louis to Vicksburg, from Kansas City to Louisville. Every bridge down, every highway torn, every house gone.
America’s heartland has fallen into the nightmare known as the Rift, a fault line in the earth that wrenchingly exposes the fractures in American society itself. As a strange white mist smelling of sulfur rises from the crevassed ground, the real terror begins for the survivors, who will soon envy the dead, including:
- Jason Adams, a teenager separated from his mother;
- Nick Ruford, an African-American engineer searching for his estranged daughter;
- Noble Frankland, the television preacher whose visions of hell have become all too real;
- Larry Hallock, a technician working frantically to prevent a nuclear meltdown at his power station;
- And Omar Paxton, a sheriff and Ku Klux Klansman who seeks racial vengeance in the turmoil of disaster.
Walter J. Williams has created a modern American disaster saga, a story based on terrifying fact, filled with non-stop action, peopled with characters who are heartbreakingly real. Witnessing authentic heroes surfacing in the unlikeliest places, you will share their horror, feel their despair, and triumph with them in their struggle to survive. One thing you will know for sure: It can happen here. And sooner or later, it will.
- The Rift
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 5/28/19
Formats: Digital Audy
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- How to Fracture a Fairy Tale
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By Jane Yolen
Introduction by Marissa Meyer
Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 5/28/19
Formats: Digital Audy
Fantasy icon Jane Yolen is adored by generations of readers of all ages. Now she triumphantly returns with this inspired gathering of fractured fairy tales and legends. Yolen breaks open the classics to reveal their crystalline secrets: a philosophical bridge that misses its troll, a spinner of straw as a falsely accused moneylender, the villainous wolf adjusting poorly to retirement. Each of these offerings features a new author note and original poem, illuminating tales that are old, new, and brilliantly refined.
- How to Fracture a Fairy Tale
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By Jane Yolen
Introduction by Marissa Meyer
Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 5/28/19
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Implied Spaces
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 4/02/19
Formats: Digital Audy
Aristide, a semi-retired computer scientist turned swordsman, is a scholar of the implied spaces, seeking meaning amid the accidents of architecture in a universe where reality itself has been sculpted and designed by superhuman machine intelligence. While exploring the pre-technological world Midgarth, one of four dozen pocket universes created within a series of vast, orbital matrioshka computer arrays, Aristide uncovers a fiendish plot threatening to set off a nightmare scenario, perhaps even bringing about the ultimate existential crisis: the end of civilization itself.
Traveling the pocket universes with his wormhole-edged sword Tecmessa in hand and talking cat Bitsy, avatar of the planet-sized computer Endora, at his side, Aristide must find a way to save the multiverse from subversion, sabotage, and certain destruction.
- Implied Spaces
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 4/02/19
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Kahlil Gibran’s Little Book of Secrets
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Edited by Neil Douglas-Klotz
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 4/01/19
Formats: Digital Audy
One of the most popular and profound inspirational writers of all time explores the mysteries of life. Here is bite-sized wisdom for daily living.
Kahlil Gibran’s Little Book of Secrets is a collection of Gibran’s words on life’s big questions and the mysteries of the spiritual path. It is an exploration of the riddles and conundrums that are part of the fabric of existence, and it is an attempt to penetrate and explain the mysteries of life.
Gibran was fascinated by life’s puzzles and riddles—those questions that cause us to stop what we are doing and ask, “Why?” Here are his musings about the seemingly unanswerable questions and his exploration of good and evil, love and hate, and the difference between appearances and reality.
Kahlil Gibran’s Little Book of Secrets is organized into five sections that elucidate the key issues and questions that each of us faces:
- Entering the Labyrinth of Life
- Secrets of Life and Death
- Life’s Ups and Downs
- Secrets of Good and Evil
- Traveling the Inner Path
This inspirational volume gently guides listeners through life’s big issues: meaning and mortality, good and evil, and discovering an authentic spiritual path. Suitable for all gift-giving occasions, it delights, informs, and inspires.
- Kahlil Gibran’s Little Book of Secrets
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Edited by Neil Douglas-Klotz
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 4/01/19
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Spaceport Earth
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 2/26/19
Formats: Digital Audy
Is there a future in orbit? This timely book reveals the state of spaceflight at a crucial juncture in the industry’s history.
It’s the twenty-first century, and everything about the space industry is changing. Rather than despair over the end of American manned missions and a moribund commercial launch market, private sector companies are now changing the way humanity accesses orbit. Upstarts including Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are building a dizzying array of new spacecraft and rockets, not just for government use, but for any paying customer. At the heart of this space revolution are spaceports, the center and literal launching pads of spaceflight. Spaceports cost hundreds of millions of dollars, face extreme competition, and host operations that do not tolerate failures―which can often be fatal.
Aerospace journalist Joe Pappalardo has witnessed space rocket launches around the world, from the jungle of French Guiana to the coastline of California. In his comprehensive work Spaceport Earth, Pappalardo describes the rise of private companies in the United States and how they are reshaping the way the world is using space for industry and science. Spaceport Earth is a travelogue through modern space history as it is being made, offering space enthusiasts, futurists, and technology buffs a close perspective of rockets and launch sites, and chronicling the stories of industrial titans, engineers, government officials, billionaires, schemers, and politicians who are redefining what it means for humans to be a spacefaring species.
- Spaceport Earth
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 2/26/19
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Hard Landing
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By Algis Budrys
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 1/08/19
Formats: Digital Audy
A science fiction adventure told from the point of view of aliens who crash-land on Earth and must assimilate in secret—until their human cover is blown
Budrys’s final novel opens with the report of a man found electrocuted on suburban train tracks in Shoreview, Illinois. Neville Sealman appeared to be just another commuter, but after his tragic death, no one comes forward to claim his body. And a routine autopsy reveals some disturbing physiological anomalies. Then a spaceship is unearthed in a New Jersey swamp. It’s the stuff of tabloids—except it’s all true.
Years earlier, a starship crash-landed on Earth. Its passengers, human in appearance, were forced to go their separate ways in an alien world. No one knows that these otherworldly visitors have been living among the human race—but now their cover could be blown.
Told in the form of an investigation reconstructed through direct and indirect witness testimony, Hard Landing takes the listener into the minds of its four protagonists as they struggle with the far-reaching ramifications of discovery. This is a suspenseful and revelatory novel about the elusive, ever-changing nature of identity.
- Hard Landing
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By Algis Budrys
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 1/08/19
Formats: Digital Audy
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- You’re Dead
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By Chris Knopf
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 12/21/18
Formats: Digital Audy
Organizational psychologist Dr. Waters is a happily solitary guy with a few deep attachments, including to his boss Paresh Rajput, the owner of a thriving hi-tech aerospace company. Until something really bad happens to CEO Rajput, which throws Waters into a lunatic swirl of murderous stalkers, corporate intrigue, amorous female executives, and crafty cops who see the inscrutable psychologist as murder suspect #1.
Waters is hardly defenseless. A weight-lifter and former wrestler, ace poker player and master student of human nature, he takes it all on with surprising strength and determination.
If they only knew. As with the connivers surrounding him, Waters has his own secrets. Autistic as a child, he lives with the consequences—some blessings, others a curse. And a love affair that’s hidden even more deeply, or so he thinks.
You’re Dead is a mystery/thriller, an adventure story, though in the context of the present zeitgeist the financial stakes of hi-tech ascendancy and flourishing commerce, corporate and personal venality, manipulations by the rich and powerful men and women and the ugly presence of base criminality that crackles around the fringes. It’s about troubled and troubling minds, and institutions that struggle to assert relevance, but also how one man, single-minded and apart, can disrupt what the lead detective on the case calls “their clever-clever ways.”
Every writer has their themes and preoccupations. For Knopf, it’s the intricacies of the mind, the most complex organism in the universe. The aberrations, as well as the indefinable “normal.” You’re Dead is an action-filled examination of what happens when minds of all kinds collide.
- You’re Dead
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By Chris Knopf
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 12/21/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- To Shape a New World
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Edited by Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry
Read by Kevin Kenerly, Priya Ayyar, Cary Hite, Robin Miles, and Carrington MacDuffie
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Release Date: 12/04/18
Formats: Digital Audy
Martin Luther King Jr. may be America’s most revered political figure, commemorated in statues, celebrations, and street names around the world. On the fiftieth anniversary of King’s assassination, the man and his activism are as close to public consciousness as ever. But despite his stature, the significance of King’s writings and political thought remains underappreciated.
In To Shape a New World, Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry write that the marginalization of King’s ideas reflects a romantic, consensus history that renders the civil rights movement inherently conservative―an effort not at radical reform but at “living up to” enduring ideals laid down by the nation’s founders. On this view, King marshaled lofty rhetoric to help redeem the ideas of universal (white) heroes, but produced little original thought. This failure to engage deeply and honestly with King’s writings allows him to be conscripted into political projects he would not endorse, including the pernicious form of “color blindness” that insists, amid glaring race-based injustice, that racism has been overcome.
Cornel West, Danielle Allen, Martha Nussbaum, Robert Gooding-Williams, and other authors join Shelby and Terry in careful, critical engagement with King’s understudied writings on labor and welfare rights, voting rights, racism, civil disobedience, nonviolence, economic inequality, poverty, love, just-war theory, virtue ethics, political theology, imperialism, nationalism, reparations, and social justice. In King’s exciting and learned work, the authors find an array of compelling challenges to some of the most pressing political dilemmas of our present, and rethink the legacy of this towering figure.
- To Shape a New World
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Edited by Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry
Read by Kevin Kenerly, Priya Ayyar, Cary Hite, Robin Miles, and Carrington MacDuffie
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Release Date: 12/04/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Wisdom of Wolves
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By Jim Dutcher and Jamie Dutcher, with James Manfull
Foreword by Marc Bekoff
Read by Traber Burns, Kate Mulligan, and Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 12/04/18
Formats: Digital Audy
From the world-famous couple who lived alongside a three-generation wolf pack comes this book of inspiration, drawn from the wild, that will fascinate animal lovers and nature lovers alike.
For six years Jim and Jamie Dutcher lived intimately with a pack of wolves, gaining their trust as no one has before. In this book the Dutchers reflect on the virtues they observed in wolf society and behavior. Each chapter exemplifies a principle, such as kindness, teamwork, playfulness, respect, curiosity, and compassion. Their heartfelt stories combine into a thought-provoking meditation on the values shared between the human and the animal world.
- The Wisdom of Wolves
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By Jim Dutcher and Jamie Dutcher, with James Manfull
Foreword by Marc Bekoff
Read by Traber Burns, Kate Mulligan, and Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 12/04/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Truth about Grace
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Read by Suzanne Toren, Bahni Turpin, Janina Edwards, and Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 11/06/18
Formats: Digital Audy
In this sequel to The Pecan Man, Eldred Mims has died in prison after serving time for a crime he did not commit. When Ora Lee Beckworth decides to set the record straight, her confession leaves Blanche Lowery’s daughters, Patrice and Grace, to grapple with the aftermath of a lifetime of lies. Now the sisters must reframe everything they thought they knew about their mother, their brother, and the man they knew as Eddie.
- The Truth about Grace
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Read by Suzanne Toren, Bahni Turpin, Janina Edwards, and Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 11/06/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Top Secret Alien Abduction Files
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By Nick Redfern
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 11/01/18
Formats: Digital Audy
For decades, people have reported close encounters with extraterrestrial entities. Witnesses describe being kidnapped by large-headed, black-eyed creatures from other worlds. Those same creatures have become popularly known as “the Grays.” There is, however, another aspect to the alien abduction controversy.
Abductees very often report being followed and spied upon by military and government personnel. It is typical for abductees to see black helicopters hovering directly over their homes in an intimidating manner. Phone calls are monitored. Emails are hacked into. Strange men dressed in black suits are seen photographing the homes of the abductees. All of this brings us to the matter of what have become known in the domain of alien abduction research as “Military Abductions,” or “MILABS.”
According to numerous abductees, after being kidnapped by aliens they are kidnapped again—by the government. These follow-up events are the work of a powerful group hidden deep within the military and the intelligence community. It is the secret agenda of this highly classified organization to figure out what the so-called Grays are really up to. And, the best way for the government to get the answers is to interrogate those who have come face-to-face with the UFO phenomenon: the abductees.
Why is the government secretly compiling files on alien abductees? Is the alien abduction issue so sinister that it has become a matter of national security proportions?
- Top Secret Alien Abduction Files
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By Nick Redfern
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 11/01/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Kahlil Gibran’s Little Book of Love
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Compiled by Neil Douglas-Klotz
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 10/01/18
Formats: Digital Audy
Kahlil Gibran’s aphorisms, stories, and poetry on a theme remain among some of those best known to Western readers. His views, however, extend beyond the most-quoted “greeting card” sayings to a wide realm of human emotions and relationships—passion, desire, idealized love, justice, friendship, and the challenges of dealing with strangers, neighbors, and enemies. This little book captures love and life in all of their complexities and nuances.
This little volume includes over ninety selections from Gibran’s writings and is divided into four sections:
- Love’s Initiation
- The Veils of Love
- All of Our Relationships
- A Love Beyond
This book, ideal for all gift-giving occasions, is informative, illuminating, and inspirational.
Whom Do We Love?
When I stood, a clear mirror before you,
you gazed into me and saw your image.
Then you said, “I love you.”
But in truth you loved yourself in me.
Love is the veil between lover and lover- Kahlil Gibran’s Little Book of Love
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Compiled by Neil Douglas-Klotz
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 10/01/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Blood & Ivy
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By Paul Collins
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 7/17/18
Formats: Digital Audy
A delectable true-crime story of scandal and murder at America’s most celebrated university
On November 23, 1849, in the heart of Boston, one of the city’s richest men vanished. Dr. George Parkman, a Brahmin who owned much of Boston’s West End, was last seen that afternoon visiting his alma mater, Harvard Medical School. Police scoured city tenements and the harbor―some leads put Parkman at sea or in Manhattan―but a Harvard janitor held a much darker suspicion: that their ruthless benefactor had never even left the Medical School building. His shocking discovery engulfed America in one of its most infamous trials, The Commonwealth of Massachusetts vs. John White Webster, Harvard’s professor of chemistry. A baffling case of red herrings, grave robbing, and dismemberment, it became a landmark in the use of medical forensics. Rich in characters and atmosphere, Blood & Ivy explores the fatal entanglement of new science and old money in one of America’s greatest murder mysteries.
- Blood & Ivy
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By Paul Collins
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 7/17/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Echoes of Light
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 11/28/17
Formats: Digital Audy
Zohar, an ancient land of sand and splendor, rallies for its last stand. The genocidal Aelarian Empire sends its legions to destroy the small desert kingdom. King Epher and his band of rebels stand against a fire they cannot extinguish. And it is Claudia herself, once Epher’s paramour, who leads the legions tasked with killing him.
Across the sea, in the Empire’s capital, a cruel new emperor has seized power. Atalia Sela, once the leader of a barbarian horde, now fights in the arena as a gladiator. Ofeer Sela, once a concubine and now a rebel, seeks to free her sister. Meanwhile, Seneca and Valentina, the children of fallen dynasties, still battle for the city, and their inevitable clash draws near.
Around the Encircled Sea, warlords, rebels, and legionaries battle for dominance. Sometimes it seems like the fire will always burn. Yet heroes still rise, fighting for a dream of peace, for memories of solace, and for lingering echoes of light.
- Echoes of Light
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 11/28/17
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Halls of Shadow
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 10/31/17
Formats: Digital Audy
The world reels from the assassination of the Mad Empress. The Aelarian Empire is cracking. From the ashes of a burnt world, warlords, barbarians, and rebels emerge to claim the remains.
Outside the walls of Aelar, different factions converge. Tribal warriors prepare to shatter the gates. Valentina, a senator’s daughter, seeks to enter the city and rebuild the Republic. Prince Seneca, the last scion of a mighty house, battles his rivals to the throne and strives to hold the Empire together. Meanwhile, within the walls, dark magic and conspiracies brew.
In the distant desert, the kingdom of Zohar crumbles. The Empire musters to grind Zohar’s cities into dust. Epher, King of Zohar, and his sister Maya, a powerful lumer, fight desperately to defeat the Empire’s legions. Yet their greatest enemy might be the mysterious, shadowy figure that roams their ancient land.
In smoldering battlefields, crows feast and humans squabble for the last shreds of power. Yet can the splendor of past glory ever shine again, or will the final victors rule from halls of shadow?
- Halls of Shadow
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 10/31/17
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Talented Ribkins
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 10/10/17
Formats: Digital Audy
At seventy-two, Johnny Ribkins shouldn’t have such problems: he’s got one week to come up with the money he stole from his mobster boss or it’s curtains.
What may or may not be useful to Johnny as he flees is that he comes from an African American family that has been gifted with superpowers that are a bit, well, odd. Okay, very odd. For example, Johnny’s father could see colors no one else could see. His brother could scale perfectly flat walls. His cousin belches fire. And Johnny himself can make precise maps of any space you name, whether he’s been there or not.
In the old days, the Ribkins family tried to apply their gifts to the civil rights effort, calling themselves the Justice Committee. But when their, eh, superpowers proved insufficient, the group fell apart. Out of frustration Johnny and his brother used their talents to stage a series of burglaries, each more daring than the last.
Fast forward a couple decades and Johnny’s in a race against the clock to dig up loot he’s stashed all over Florida. His brother is gone, but he has an unexpected sidekick: his brother’s daughter, Eloise, who has a special superpower of her own.
Inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois’ famous essay “The Talented Tenth” and fueled by Ladee Hubbard’s marvelously original imagination, The Talented Ribkins is a big-hearted debut novel about race, class, politics, and the unique gifts that, while they may cause some problems from time to time, bind a family together.
- The Talented Ribkins
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 10/10/17
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Temples of Dust
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 10/03/17
Formats: Digital Audy
The sadistic Empress Porcia rules over a shattering empire.
Risen from misty forests, a barbarian horde sweeps toward her capital. Across the southern sea, her brother builds an armada to slay her. In the cold north, young Princess Valentina seeks allies to destroy the Empire and rebuild the Republic. As the noose tightens around Porcia’s neck, the empress musters her armies, willing to burn the world to protect her throne.
Meanwhile, in the eastern desert, the land of Zohar groans under the heel of the Empire. Epher Sela has taken the small kingdom’s throne, and the Empire’s legions march to destroy him. Even farther east, his sister—the lumer Maya—discovers the secrets of light and magic. Perhaps only Maya can save Zohar during its darkest hour. But before she can face the legions, Maya must defeat an unearthly evil, one more dangerous than any human host.
Soldiers and sorcerers, emperors and urchins, priests and princes—in a burning world, they battle for power and pray for deliverance. Yet do their gods truly hear, or do all their prayers merely echo in temples of dust?
- Temples of Dust
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 10/03/17
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Thrones of Ash
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 9/05/17
Formats: Digital Audy
The Empire burns.
The old emperor is dead. His daughter, the sadistic Porcia Octavius, has won a bloodthirsty battle for the crown. But she will not rest easy on her throne.
Already her brother sails to foreign lands, seeking to build an army and dethrone her. In a southern savanna province, a young queen rises up against the Empire. In northern misty forests, barbarian tribes gather for war. In Zohar, the eastern desert, the hero Epher Sela joins a rebellion against the vicious empress. Meanwhile, past desert and mountains at the edge of the world, an ancient evil awakens, threatening to undo all that humanity has built.
Legionaries, rebels, and priests clash, vying to rule crumbling kingdoms. Yet when victors emerge from the inferno, will they find only thrones of ash?
- Thrones of Ash
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 9/05/17
Formats: Digital Audy
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- A Kind of Freedom
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Read by Kevin Kenerly, Bahni Turpin, and Adenrele Ojo
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Release Date: 8/15/17
Formats: Digital Audy
Evelyn is a Creole woman who comes of age in New Orleans at the height of World War II. Her family inhabits the upper echelon of black society, and when she falls for no-name Renard, she is forced to choose between her life of privilege and the man she loves.
In 1982, Evelyn’s daughter Jackie is a frazzled single mother grappling with her absent husband’s drug addiction. Just as she comes to terms with his abandoning the family, he returns, ready to resume their old life. Jackie must decide if the promise of her husband is worth the near certainty that he will leave again.
Jackie’s son T. C. loves the creative process of growing marijuana more than the weed itself. He finds something hypnotic about training the seedlings, testing the levels, trimming the leaves, and drying the buds. He was a square before Hurricane Katrina, but the New Orleans he knew didn’t survive the storm, and in its wake he was changed too. Now, fresh out of a four-month stint for possession with the intent to distribute, he decides to start over―until an old friend convinces him to stake his new beginning on one last deal.
For Evelyn, Jim Crow is an ongoing reality, and in its wake new threats spring up to haunt her descendants. A Kind of Freedom is an urgent novel that explores the legacy of racial disparity in the South through a poignant and redemptive family history.
- A Kind of Freedom
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Read by Kevin Kenerly, Bahni Turpin, and Adenrele Ojo
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Release Date: 8/15/17
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Crowns of Rust
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 8/08/17
Formats: Digital Audy
A noble leader is dead. His five children, once heirs to a bustling port, are scattered around the Encircled Sea. Their kingdom, the ancient land of Zohar, has fallen to the cruel Aelarian Empire.
As the dust settles, new fires kindle.
In a shattering world, the pieces are up for grabs. Here fleets clash at sea, and desert warriors battle among dunes and ancient ruins; cloaked conspirators gather in shadowy alleyways, vowing to slay their emperor; and a girl seeks the magic of light beyond guardians of shadow. In a land of sand and splendor, glory will go to those with the sharpest steel and the hardest hearts. One war has ended. Now the world will burn.
When the Encircled Sea storms, kingdoms are no sturdier than sandcastles. Rulers and rebels battle for golden thrones, but will they find only crowns of rust?
- Crowns of Rust
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 8/08/17
Formats: Digital Audy
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- What Matters in Mayhew
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Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 7/18/17
Formats: Digital Audy
Every town has at least one beloved, if misunderstood, eccentric, and Beanie Bradsher belongs to Mayhew Junction. Some, LouWanda Crump, for example, would call Beanie a spectacle, but Beanie just marches—and dresses—to the beat of a different drum.
Not much has changed over the years in this town. On any given morning, you’ll find the same people at the same table at the same café, and none of them have changed one iota in the past twenty years. But now Beanie Bradsher has won the lottery, and might be dating Sweet Lee Atwater’s husband. And the hometown basketball star Vesuvius Jones just got a face full of Red Velvet cake at the Trunk-or-Treat.
The gossip has never been juicier, which might just be a good thing. Lord knows this town could use a good shaking up.
- What Matters in Mayhew
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Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 7/18/17
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Kings of Ruin
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 7/04/17
Formats: Digital Audy
In an ancient world of sand and splendor, an empire awakens.
Aelar, a mighty nation, spreads its tentacles. Its oared galleys storm the seas, and the waters run red with blood. Its legionaries swarm desert ruins, smiting barbarian hordes. Its crosses line the roadsides, displaying the dying flesh of heroes.
The Aelarian Empire rises. The old world falls.
The powerful Sela family has avoided the empire until now. The family has carved out an idyllic life between sea and desert, ruling a bustling port, a thriving city, and lush vineyards. Yet when an imperial fleet arrives in their harbor, everything the Sela family has built threatens to collapse.
Sweeping from snowy forests to cruel deserts, from bazaars of wonder to fields of war, here is a tale of legionaries and lepers, priests and paupers, kings and crows. Here a girl travels across endless dunes, seeking magic; a cruel prince struggles to claim a bloodstained throne; and a young soldier fights to hold back an overwhelming host. As the empire spreads, the fate of the Sela family—and of all civilization—stands upon a knife’s edge, for under the storm of war, even the greatest nations are but kingdoms of sand.
- Kings of Ruin
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Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 7/04/17
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The New Dad’s Playbook
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Foreword by Meg Meeker, MD
Introduction by Kirsten Watson
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 5/02/17
Formats: Digital Audy
When it comes to the unknown territory of having a baby, moms-to-be have nearly unending resources to plan and execute a healthy pregnancy and navigate those first months and years as a parent with confidence. New dads? Not so much. They want to get in the game too, but, says Super Bowl champion Benjamin Watson, “I could find clearer direction for putting together a baby swing than for taking care of a newborn child.”
The New Dad’s Playbook is every man’s game plan to being the best partner and the best father, from preseason (preparing for fatherhood) to Super Bowl (birth) to postseason (after baby is home). It helps men understand what their wives are going through physically and emotionally during and after pregnancy, allowing them to support their most important teammate. It tells men what to expect when their baby is home—and what to do when the unexpected happens. This tell-it-like-it-is book will take men from just winging it to winning it.
- The New Dad’s Playbook
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Foreword by Meg Meeker, MD
Introduction by Kirsten Watson
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 5/02/17
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Oakland Noir
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Edited by Jerry Thompson and Eddie Muller
Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 4/04/17
Formats: Digital Audy
Brand-new stories by: Nick Petrulakis, Kim Addonizio, Keenan Norris, Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder, Katie Gilmartin, Dorothy Lazard, Harry Louis Williams II, Carolyn Alexander, Phil Canalin, Judy Juanita, Jamie DeWolf, Nayomi Munaweera, Mahmud Rahman, Tom McElravey, Joe Loya, and Eddie Muller.
In the wake of San Francisco Noir, Los Angeles Noir, and Orange County Noir—all popular volumes in the Akashic Noir Series—comes the latest California installment, Oakland Noir. Masterfully curated by Jerry Thompson and Eddie Muller, the “Czar of Noir,” this volume will shock, titillate, provoke, and entertain. The diverse cast of talented contributors will not disappoint.
From the introduction:
Jerry Thompson: “Discovering the wang-dang-doodle jams of the Pointer Sisters shifted my entire focus. Stunning black women were scatting and bebopping all the way into my soul. I think what we’ve put together in Oakland Noir is a volume where this city is a character in every story. He’s a slick brother strutting over a bacon-grease bass line and tambourine duet. She’s a white chick with a bucket of hot muffins heading to farmer and flea markets, to sell crafts and get hooked up with some fine kat with dreadlocks and a criminal record. And it’s in the faces of young fearless muthafuckers pounding keyboards and snapping fingers, lips, Snapchats, and Facebook timelines. It’s the core of not only Black Lives Matter but all lives matter. We are the children of fantasy and of the funk.”
Eddie Muller: “These days, writers and readers aren’t denying the darker parts of our existence as much as they used to, especially in crime fiction. Some writers just do it for fun because it’s become the fashionable way to get published. You know, ‘gritty violence’ and all that bullshit. The genuine darkness in noir stories comes from two places—the cruelty of the world’s innate indifference and the cruelty that people foster within themselves. If you’re not seriously dealing with one, the other, or both, then you’re not really writing noir.”
- Oakland Noir
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Edited by Jerry Thompson and Eddie Muller
Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 4/04/17
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Slavery’s Capitalism
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Edited by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman
Read by William Hughes, Kevin Kenerly, Bahni Turpin, Pam Ward, and Ron Butler
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Release Date: 3/07/17
Formats: Digital Audy
During the nineteenth century, the United States entered the ranks of the world’s most advanced and dynamic economies. At the same time, the nation sustained an expansive and brutal system of human bondage.
This was no mere coincidence. Slavery’s Capitalism argues for slavery’s centrality to the emergence of American capitalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. According to editors Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, the issue is not whether slavery itself was or was not capitalist but, rather, the impossibility of understanding the nation’s spectacular pattern of economic development without situating slavery front and center.
American capitalism—renowned for its celebration of market competition, private property, and the self-made man—has its origins in an American slavery predicated on the abhorrent notion that human beings could be legally owned and compelled to work under force of violence.
Drawing on the expertise of sixteen scholars who are at the forefront of rewriting the history of American economic development, Slavery’s Capitalism identifies slavery as the primary force driving key innovations in entrepreneurship, finance, accounting, management, and political economy that are too often attributed to the so-called free market.
Approaching the study of slavery as the originating catalyst for the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism casts new light on American credit markets, practices of offshore investment, and understandings of human capital. Rather than seeing slavery as outside the institutional structures of capitalism, the essayists recover slavery’s importance to the American economic past and prompt enduring questions about the relationship of market freedom to human freedom.
Contributors: Edward E. Baptist, Sven Beckert, Daina Ramey Berry, Kathryn Boodry, Alfred L. Brophy, Stephen Chambers, Eric Kimball, John Majewski, Bonnie Martin, Seth Rockman, Daniel B. Rood, Caitlin Rosenthal, Joshua D. Rothman, Calvin Schermerhorn, Andrew Shankman, Craig Steven Wilder.
- Slavery’s Capitalism
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Edited by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman
Read by William Hughes, Kevin Kenerly, Bahni Turpin, Pam Ward, and Ron Butler
-
Release Date: 3/07/17
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Nobody
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Foreword written and read by Todd Brewster
Read by Kevin Kenerly
-
Release Date: 2/28/17
Formats: Digital Audy
Protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and across the United States following the death of Michael Brown revealed something far deeper than a passionate display of age-old racial frustrations; they unveiled a public chasm that has been growing for years, as America has consistently and intentionally denied significant segments of its population access to full freedom and prosperity.
In Nobody, scholar and journalist Marc Lamont Hill presents a powerful and thought-provoking analysis of race and class by examining a growing crisis in America: the existence of a group of citizens who are made vulnerable, exploitable, and disposable through the machinery of unregulated capitalism, public policy, and social practice. These are the people considered “Nobody” in contemporary America. Through on-the-ground reporting and careful research, Hill shows how this Nobody class has emerged over time and how forces in America have worked to preserve and exploit it in ways that are both humiliating and harmful.
To make his case, Hill carefully reconsiders the details of tragic events like the deaths of Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, and Freddie Gray, and the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. He delves deeply into a host of alarming trends including mass incarceration, overly aggressive policing, broken court systems, shrinking job markets, and the privatization of public resources, showing time and time again the ways the current system is designed to worsen the plight of the vulnerable.
Timely and eloquent, Nobody is a keen observation of the challenges and contradictions of American democracy, a must-read for anyone wanting to better understand the race and class issues that continue to leave their mark on our country today.
- Nobody
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Foreword written and read by Todd Brewster
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 2/28/17
Formats: Digital Audy
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- St. Louis Noir
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Edited by Scott Phillips
Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 8/02/16
Formats: Digital Audy
Edited by the bestselling author of The Ice Harvest, St. Louis Noir thickens the Midwest quotient for the Akashic Noir series.
Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.
In the wake of Chicago Noir, Twin Cities Noir, and Kansas City Noir—all popular volumes in the Akashic Noir Series—comes the latest Midwest installment, St. Louis Noir. Masterfully curated by Scott Phillips, author of The Ice Harvest (adapted for film, starring John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton), this volume will chill the listener with heartland menace.
Featuring brand new stories by Calvin Wilson, LaVelle Wilkins-Chinn, John Lutz, Paul D. Marks, Colleen J. McElroy, Jason Makansi, S. L. Coney, Michael Castro, Laura Benedict, Jedidiah Ayres, Umar Lee, Chris Barsanti, L. J. Smith, and Scott Phillips.
- St. Louis Noir
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Edited by Scott Phillips
Read by various narrators
-
Release Date: 8/02/16
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Willnot
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By James Sallis
Read by Kevin Kenerly
-
Release Date: 6/21/16
Formats: Digital Audy
A brilliant new protagonist and his memorable community are introduced in the latest masterpiece by acclaimed novelist James Sallis.
In his celebrated career, James Sallis has created some of the most finely drawn protagonists in crime fiction, all of them thoughtful observers of the human condition: Lew Griffin, the black New Orleans private investigator; retired detective John Turner; the unnamed wheelman in Drive. Dr. Lamar Hale will now join the ranks of Sallis’ finest characters.
In the woods outside the town of Willnot, the remains of several people have suddenly been discovered, unnerving the community and unsettling Hale, the town’s all-purpose general practitioner, surgeon, and conscience. At the same time, Bobby Lowndes—a man being followed by the FBI—mysteriously reappears in his hometown at Hale’s door. Over the ensuing months, the daily dramas Hale faces as he tends to his town and to his partner, Richard, collide with the swerves and turns of life in Willnot. And when a gunshot aimed at Lowndes critically wounds Richard, Hale’s world is truly upended.
In his inimitable spare style, James Sallis conjures indelible characters and scenes that resonate long after they appear. “You live with someone year after year, you think you’ve heard all the stories,” Lamar observes, “but you never have.”
- Willnot
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By James Sallis
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 6/21/16
Formats: Digital Audy
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- To Live Forever
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By Jack Vance
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 9/01/15
Formats: Digital Audy
Waylock had been granted eternal life—but now he was killing on borrowed time.
Gavin Waylock had waited seven years for the scandal surrounding his former immortal self to be forgotten and had kept his identity concealed so that he could once again join the ranks of those who lived forever. He had been exceedingly careful about hiding his past. Then he met the Jacynth. She was a beautiful nineteen-year-old, and Gavin wanted her. But he recognized that a wisdom far beyond her years marked her as one who knew too much about him to live. As far as she was concerned, death was a mere inconvenience. But once the Jacynth came back, Gavin Waylock’s life would be an everlasting hell.
- To Live Forever
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By Jack Vance
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 9/01/15
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Bottom
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By Howard Owen
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 8/31/15
Formats: Digital Audy
Richmond is in a panic. For the fourth time in eighteen months, a young girl or woman has been brutalized and murdered. This time the body of a fourteen-year-old girl is found in Richmond’s Shockoe Bottom train station. On her ankle is the same perversely cartoonish tattoo that has led the cops and newspapers to dub the perpetrator the Tweety Bird killer.
When Willie Black finds out that the night security guy at the station was lured away from his post by a phone call from Willie’s daughter just before the body was dumped, the story gets weirder—and a lot more personal.
At the same time, Willie’s paper is facing a lawsuit from a developer who wants to make a killing of another kind by turning part of the Bottom into Top of the Bottom—a mix of big-box stores and apartments. It’s an area where slaves were buried in unmarked graves, many of them still not discovered. The Bottom is emblematic of what Willie thinks of as the permanent stain Richmond can never wash away, but now he and the paper are under pressure to “lay off” Wat Chenault and his plans to turn the land into a real estate bonanza.
When the police arrest Ronnie Sax, a photographer who used to work at Willie’s paper, for the murders, the evidence seems overwhelming. But then Willie starts getting letters from someone who seems to know more about the killings than an innocent bystander should. Sax is eventually released, and the city goes on high alert once again. At the same time, Willie grows more and more suspicious about Chenault’s motives.
Willie is also trying to crawl back into the good graces of the lovely Cindy Peroni, seeking to convince her that he at last has a handle on his bourbon and two-packs-a-day habits.
In The Bottom, the fourth Willie Black mystery, Richmond’s nosiest newspaperman, true to form, chases the story like a bulldog going after a pork chop. But once he’s caught it, he’ll wish he hadn’t.
- The Bottom
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By Howard Owen
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 8/31/15
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Parker Field
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By Howard Owen
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 6/27/14
Formats: Digital Audy
Les Hacker doesn't seem to have an enemy in the world—other than whoever tried to kill him with a high-powered rifle while he was sitting on a park bench six floors below Willie Black's living room window. Les is the closest thing Willie has had to a father figure in a checkered life of drinking, divorces, and journalism. He certainly has better qualifications than any of the other men Willie's mother, Peggy, took in over the years. Of course, as Willie would say, that would only make him a tall midget.
Now, with Les clinging to life, Willie decides to take a short sabbatical and do a story about his surrogate dad and the last minor-league baseball team Les played on: the 1964 Richmond Virginians.
There's only one problem. As Willie tries to get in touch with other members of that team, he discovers that they are almost all below ground—most of them long before their allotted three-score and ten years. The cops already have Les' shooter in jail, a homeless guy who hangs out in the park. The shot was fired from his coat pocket, case closed. Willie's publisher and the police want him to stop wasting his time—and theirs—and get back on the beat. Willie becomes convinced, though, that someone, against all logic, is killing the entire starting lineup of a long-forgotten minor-league baseball team. And when Willie gets his teeth on the truth, he's a pit bull who won't let anything short of a shot to the head force him to let go.
In this third Willie Black novel, after Hammett Prize finalist Oregon Hill and The Philadelphia Quarry, Howard Owen brings back his flawed, ink-stained hero, a reporter who seems to do his best work when he's chasing a story nobody else wants, who can be his own worst enemy and the underdog's best friend.
- Parker Field
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By Howard Owen
Read by Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 6/27/14
Formats: Digital Audy