Narrator

Jim Meskimen

Jim Meskimen
  • Goosebumps creator R. L. Stine teams up with the pop-culture phenomenon Garbage Pail Kids for the third volume in this New York Times bestselling middle-grade series.

    The Garbage Pail Kids are off to sleepaway camp in the third installment of the New York Times bestselling Garbage Pail Kids series!

    Welcome to the town of Smellville, where ten kids all live in a big tumbledown house and have as much fun as they possibly can. People may think that they’re gross and weird and slobby and strange, but they’re not bad kids—they just don’t know any better. In this hilarious series from bestselling author R. L. Stine, the Garbage Pail Kids—from Adam Bomb to Brainy Janey—get into mischief at their middle school. These all-new stories are guaranteed to amuse and entertain readers of all ages.

  • A debut thriller for fans of Lucy Foley and Liz Moore, Dark Things I Adore is a stunning Gone Girl-esque tale of atonement that proves that in the grasp of manipulative men, women may momentarily fall. But in the hands of fierce women, men will be brought to their knees.

    Three campfire secrets. Two witnesses. One dead in the trees. And the woman, thirty years later, bent on making the guilty finally pay.

    1988. A group of outcasts gather at a small, prestigious arts camp nestled in the Maine woods. They’re the painters: bright, hopeful, teeming with potential. But secrets and dark ambitions rise like smoke from a campfire, and the truths they tell will come back to haunt them in ways more deadly than they dreamed.

    2018. Esteemed art professor Max Durant arrives at his protégé’s remote home to view her graduate thesis collection. He knows Audra is beautiful and brilliant. He knows being invited into her private world is a rare gift. But he doesn't know that Audra has engineered every aspect of their weekend together. Every detail, every conversation. Audra has woven the perfect web.

    Only Audra knows what happened that summer in 1988. Max’s secret, and the dark things that followed. And even though it won’t be easy, Audra knows someone must pay.

    A searing psychological thriller of trauma, dark academia, complicity, and revenge, Dark Things I Adore unravels the realities behind campfire legends―the horrors that happen in the dark, the girls who become cautionary tales, and the guilty who go unpunished. Until now.

  • Goosebumps creator R. L. Stine teams up with the pop-culture phenomenon Garbage Pail Kids for the second volume in this all-new middle-grade series sure to amuse, entertain, and blow readers away!

    The Garbage Pail Kids are desperate to win the Smellville Pet Contest. But how can they compete against Good Boy, the perfect Chihuahua of the Perfect twins? Good Boy can stand on his head and do algebra problems blindfolded. But the whole thing goes out of control when our heroes meet five new kids who also call themselves the Garbage Pail Kids! Meet Windy Winston, Nat Nerd, Brett Sweat, Nasty Nancy, and Disgustin’ Justin. They all share the grand prize—a free all-day trip to Six Thrills Amusement Park. Will anyone have a good time? And will anyone survive?

  • “Read this book, strengthen your resolve, and help us all return to reason.”  —JORDAN PETERSON

    There’s a war against truth … and if we don’t win it, intellectual freedom will be a casualty.

    The West’s commitment to freedom, reason, and true liberalism have become endangered by a series of viral forces in our society today. Renowned host of the popular YouTube show The Saad Truth, Dr. Gad Saad exposes how an epidemic of idea pathogens are spreading like a virus and killing common sense in the West.

    Serving as a powerful follow-up to Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life, Dr. Saad unpacks what is really happening in progressive safe zones, why we need to be paying more attention to these trends, and what we must do to stop the spread of dangerous thinking. A professor at Concordia University who has witnessed this troubling epidemic first-hand, Dr. Saad dissects a multitude of these concerning forces (corrupt thought patterns, belief systems, attitudes, etc.) that have given rise to a stifling political correctness in our society and how these have created serious consequences that must be remedied—before it’s too late.

  • Goosebumps creator R. L. Stine teams up with the pop-culture phenomenon Garbage Pail Kids for a first-ever GPK middle-grade series.

    Welcome to the town of Smellville, where a dozen kids all live in a big tumbledown house and have as much fun as they possibly can. People may think that they’re gross and weird and strange, but they’re not bad kids—they just don’t know any better. In this hilarious new series from bestselling author R. L. Stine, the Garbage Pail Kids—from Adam Bomb to Brainy Janie—get into mischief at their middle school, all while battling bullies and their archenemies, Penny and Parker Perfect. These all-new stories are sure to amuse, entertain, and blow away listeners of all ages.

  • Tom Petty has long been considered one of the great songwriters of American rock ‘n’ roll, as well as one of the key standard bearers of integrity in the music business. Conversations with Tom Petty is the first authorized book to focus solely on the life and work of the man responsible for some of the most memorable rock anthems of our generation, including: American Girl,” Breakdown,” Refugee,” The Waiting,” Don’t Come Around Here No More,” I Won’t Back Down,” Free Fallin,” Runnin’ Down a Dream,” You Don’t Know How It Feels,” Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” and many others. Author Paul Zollo conducted a series of in-depth discussions with Tom about his career, with special focus on his songwriting. The conversations are reprinted here with little or no editorial comment and represent a unique perspective on Tom’s entire career. Originally published in 2005 (also by Omnibus Press), Tom’s wife Dana has fully approved this updated edition, which retains its foreword by Petty, adds additional interview material, an expanded introduction as well as additional photos from Petty’s last ever live performance. This is, perhaps, as close as you can get to an autobiography by the great man.“

  • 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.

  • National Book Award Finalist Howard Norman delivers another provocative, haunting novel, this time set in a Vermont village and featuring a missing child, a newly married private detective, and a highly relatable ghost.

    Simon Inescort is no longer bodily present in his marriage. It’s been several months since he keeled over the rail of a Nova Scotia–bound ferry, a massive heart attack to blame. Simon’s widow, Lorca Pell, has sold their farmhouse to newlyweds Zachary and Muriel—after revealing that the deed contains a “ghost clause,” an actual legal clause, not unheard of in Vermont, allowing for reimbursement if a recently purchased home turns out to be haunted.

    In fact, Simon finds himself still at home: “Every waking moment, I’m astonished I have any consciousness … What am I to call myself now, a revenant?” He spends time replaying his marriage in his own mind, as if in poignant reel-to-reel, while also engaging in occasionally intimate observation of the new homeowners. But soon the crisis of a missing child, a local eleven-year-old, threatens the tenuous domestic equilibrium, as the weight of the case falls to Zachary, a rookie private detective with the Green Mountain Agency.

    The Ghost Clause is a heartrending, affirming portrait of two marriages—one in its afterlife, one new and erotically charged—and of the Vermont village life that sustains and remakes them.

  • Gabriel Du Pré is back in action, coming to the aid of a whistleblower on the run, in this all-new novel in a “wonderfully eclectic and enjoyable series” (Booklist).

    When a hunted military whistleblower and his family need someplace to hide and someone to trust, Toussaint, Montana, is the place, and Gabriel Du Pré the man. The Métis Indian former cattle inspector and sometimes deputy is happy to offer protection, even though he’s already got his hands full with an ailing granddaughter, a meddling medicine man, and a Kazakh eagle hunter prowling the hills above town.

    As a guard at a Kabul prison, Hoyt Poe witnessed his fellow soldiers abusing the Afghan inmates. Poe’s testimony threatens to expose the military contractor that led the prison’s brutal interrogation program. Now, Temple Security’s billionaire founder, Lloyd Cutler, wants him dead. But how long can the fugitive and his family lay low before Cutler’s mercenaries come to Du Pré’s hometown looking for trouble?

    Packed with pulse-pounding suspense, wry humor, and the romance of small-town Montana, Solus continues the irresistible adventures of the one of a kind Gabriel Du Pré, “a character of legendary proportions” (New York Times bestselling author Ridley Pearson).

    Solus is the 15th book in the Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

  • The Triumph of the Egg is a fictional panorama of a great region of our country, unfolded by a writer who—to quote the New York Times—“depicts life in the Midwest as Dostoevsky pictured the many colored life of Russia, with almost as wonderful a touch of genius, with a more concentrated and daring skill.”

    This coveted 1921 collection is an example of what a book of stories can be when a writer of vision deals with the materials of American life.

  • How silver influenced two hundred years of world history, and why it matters today

    This is the story of silver’s transformation from soft money during the nineteenth century to hard asset today, and how manipulations of the white metal by American president Franklin D. Roosevelt during the 1930s and by the richest man in the world, Texas oil baron Nelson Bunker Hunt, during the 1970s altered the course of American and world history. FDR pumped up the price of silver to help jump start the US economy during the Great Depression, but this move weakened China, which was then on the silver standard, and facilitated Japan’s rise to power before World War II. Bunker Hunt went on a silver-buying spree during the 1970s to protect himself against inflation and triggered a financial crisis that left him bankrupt.

    Silver has been the preferred shelter against government defaults, political instability, and inflation for most people in the world because it is cheaper than gold. The white metal has been the place to hide when conventional investments sour, but it has also seduced sophisticated investors throughout the ages like a siren. This book explains how powerful figures, up to and including Warren Buffett, have come under silver’s thrall, and how its history guides economic and political decisions in the twenty-first century.

  • Not all the folks who roamed the Old West were cowhands, rustlers, or cardsharps. And they certainly weren’t all heroes.

    Give-a-Damn Jones, a free-spirited itinerant typographer, hates his nickname almost as much as the rumors spread about him. He’s a kind soul who keeps finding himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

    That’s what happened in Box Elder, a small Montana town. Tensions are running high, and anything—or anyone—could be the fuse to ignite them: a recently released convict trying to prove his innocence, a prominent cattleman who craves respect at any cost, a wily traveling dentist at odds with a violent local blacksmith, or a firebrand of an editor who is determined to unlock the town’s secrets.

    Jones walks into the middle of it all, and this time, he may be the hero that this town needs.

  • Johnny D. Boggs turns the battlefield itself into a character in this historical retelling of Custer’s Last Stand, when George Custer led most of his command to annihilation at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in southern Montana in 1876.

    More than forty first-person narratives are used—Indian and white, military and civilian, men and women—to paint a panorama of the battle itself.

    Boggs brings the events and personalities of the Battle of the Little Bighorn to life in a series of first-hand accounts.

  • In this rich dialogue on surveillance, empire, and power, Roy and Cusack describe meeting with National Security Agency whistleblower Ed Snowden.

    In late 2014, Arundhati Roy, John Cusack, and Daniel Ellsberg traveled to Moscow to meet with Edward Snowden. The result is a series of essays and dialogues in which Roy and Cusack reflect on their conversations with Snowden.

    In these provocative and penetrating discussions, Roy and Cusack discuss the nature of the state, empire, and surveillance in an era of perpetual war, the meaning of flags and patriotism, the role of foundations and NGOs in limiting dissent, and the ways in which capital but not people can freely cross borders.

  • William F. Buckley Jr. is widely regarded as the most influential American conservative writer, activist, and organizer in the postwar era. In this nuanced biography, Alvin Felzenberg sheds light on little-known aspects of Buckley’s career, including his role as back-channel adviser to policy makers, his intimate friendship with both Ronald and Nancy Reagan, his changing views on civil rights, and his break with George W. Bush over the Iraq War.

    Felzenberg demonstrates how Buckley conveyed his message across multiple platforms and drew upon his vast network of contacts, his personal charm, his extraordinary wit, and his celebrity status to move the center of political gravity in the United States closer to his point of view. Including many rarely seen photographs, this account of one of the most compelling personalities of American politics will appeal to conservatives, liberals, and even the apolitical.

  • California, 1957. Lee Mellon believes he is the descendant of the only Confederate general to have come from Big Sur and is himself a seeker of truth in his own modern-day war against the status quo.

    For the first time in audio, A Confederate General from Big Sur was the late Richard Brautigan’s first published novel, written when he was twenty-eight.

  • The summer warpath began in late spring 1876 and was one laid out under the command of General George Crook, perhaps the most experienced Indian fighter in the United States Army at that time. Among other officers under Crook’s command was the daring and resourceful Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Cavalry. The purpose of the campaign was to round up the wild tribes of the Cheyennes and Sioux and place them on reservations.

    Walt Staley is a drifter, a man who works only long enough so he can get enough money to be traveling again. He rides for Fort Laramie, where he successfully enlists as an Army scout under General Crook.

    Before Staley arrives at the fort, he is forced by roving Indians to stop at an Army hay camp, where he meets Dave Allison. The two become friends, especially after Allison is transferred to active service under General Crook.

    Finally, there is Patrick O’Hara, who considers himself the ace reporter at the Chicago Herald. He wants most of all to be attached to Custer’s regiment, believing that Custer alone will be able to subdue the wild Indian tribes. He is disappointed when his editor instead sends him to be attached to General Crook’s expeditionary force.

    The events that follow will change the lives of these three men forever.

  • Black Mike

    Sam Cassidy comes home to find himself in a series of tense confrontations. His father expects Sam to work for him at the local bank, and Sheriff Ben Faraday, for whom Sam worked the previous summer as deputy, is suffering from a terminal disease and wants Sam to become a deputy again. "Black Mike" Nickels wants to expand his use of public land and bring in more sheep, backed by guns. The Cattlemen's Association has vowed to stop Black Mike, but Sam's decision to become a deputy could make enemies of them both.

    Gun in His Hand

    Dane Coe is returning to Ogallala in Nebraska Territory at his father's request. He is met at the train depot by Ed Lanning, ramrod for Sam Drew's ranch, and Frank Ashton, a young gunfighter. Sam Drew will do whatever it takes to get the railroad to end its track on his own land rather than the land owned by Dane's father.

  • When Glenn Dixon is spurned by love, he packs his bags for Verona, Italy. Once there, he volunteers to answer the thousands of letters that arrive addressed to Juliet—letters sent from lovelorn people all over the world to Juliet’s hometown; people who long to understand the mysteries of the human heart.

    Glenn’s journey takes him deep into the charming community of Verona, where he becomes involved in unraveling the truth behind Romeo and Juliet. Did these star-crossed lovers actually exist? Why have they remained at the forefront of hearts and minds for centuries? And what can they teach us about love?

    When Glenn returns home to Canada and resumes his duties as an English teacher, he undertakes a lively reading of Romeo and Juliet with his students, engaging them in passions past and present. But in an intriguing reversal of fate and fortune, his students—along with an old friend—instruct the teacher on the true meaning of love, loss, and moving on.

    An enthralling tale of modern-day love steeped in the romantic traditions of eras past, this is a memoir that will warm your heart.

  • Louis L’Amour was the most decorated author in the history of American letters and a recipient of the Medal of Freedom.

    Now collected here in a single book are several of Louis L’Amour’s finest Western stories the way Mr. L’Amour wrote them. At the time Louis L’Amour was writing, it was common practice for editors to rewrite the manuscript to fit certain publishing criteria. The text of The Strong Land has been restored, and the stories within it appear as Mr. L’Amour intended for them to be read.

    Whether you’re new to the thrilling frontier fiction of Louis L’Amour or one of his legions of fans, these six short stories will assure you that you are in the hands of a master storyteller.

    Included here are:

    • “The One for the Mohave Kid,”

    • “His Brother’s Debt,”

    • “A Strong Land Growing,”

    • “Lit a Shuck for Texas,”

    • “The Nester and the Paiute,” and

    • “Barney Takes a Hand.”

  • Covering 13.8 billion years, a calculatedly concise, wryly intelligent history of everything, from the Big Bang to the advent of human civilization

    With wonder, wit, and flair—and in record time and space—geophysicist David Bercovici explains how everything came to be everywhere, from the creation of stars and galaxies to the formation of Earth’s atmosphere and oceans to the origin of life and human civilization. Bercovici marries humor and legitimate scientific intrigue, rocketing listeners across nearly fourteen billion years and making connections between the essential theories that give us our current understanding of topics as varied as particle physics, plate tectonics, and photosynthesis. Bercovici’s unique literary endeavor is a treasure trove of real, compelling science and fascinating history, providing both science lovers and complete neophytes with an unforgettable introduction to the fields of cosmology, geology, climate science, human evolution, and more.

  • An ongoing, episodic “prose comic” from which the pictures are summoned by the magic of words, Goon Squad is set in an alternate version of modern-day Manchester. Its biggest divergence from the real city is that it—along with most other large urban centers—has a team of superheroes to protect it against unusual threats with which the conventional forces of law and order would have problems.

    Goon Squad: Year One features three action-packed volumes in a single collection: Goon Squad: Special Talents, Goon Squad: Without Sin, and Goon Squad: Old Enemies.

  • Now available for the first time with two additional stories!

    Have you ever wondered what it's like to be bitten by a zombie or live through a bioweapon attack? In Cory Doctorow's collection of novellas, he wields his formidable experience in technology and computing to give us mind-bending sci-fi tales that explore the possibilities of information technology—and its various uses—run amok.

    "Anda's Game" is a spin on the bizarre new phenomenon of "cyber sweatshops," in which people are paid very low wages to play online games all day in order to generate in-game wealth, which can be converted into actual money. Another tale tells of the heroic exploits of "sysadmins"—systems administrators—as they defend the cyberworld, and hence the world at large, from worms and bioweapons. And yes, there is a story about zombies too. Plus, for the first time, this collection includes "Petard" and "The Man Who Sold the Moon."

  • From the renowned social critic, energy expert, and bestselling author James Howard Kunstler, The Harrows of Spring concludes the quartet of his extraordinary World Made by Hand novels, set in an American future of economic and political collapse, where electricity, automobiles, and the familiar social structures of the “old times” are a misty memory.

    In the little upstate New York town of Union Grove, springtime is a most difficult season, known as “the six weeks want,” when fresh food is scarce and winter stores have dwindled. Young Daniel Earle returns from his haunting travels around what is left of the United States intent on resurrecting the town newspaper. He is also recruited by the town trustees to help revive the Hudson River trade route shut down peevishly by the local grandee, planter Stephen Bullock. Meanwhile, a menacing gang of Social Justice Warriors styling themselves as agents of the Berkshire People’s Republic appear one evening to camp on the outskirts of town. Their leaders are the imposing Amazonian beauty Flame Aurora Greengrass and the charismatic grifter Sylvester “Buddy” Goodfriend, progressive to a fault in their politics and intent on extracting whatever tribute they can from people of Union Grove.

    Romance, politics, bunko, violence, and family tragedy swirl through the thrilling finale to Kunstler’s bestselling series. The Harrows of Spring is a powerful, heart-wrenching, and satisfying conclusion to this poignant history of the future.

  • 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.

  • An ongoing, episodic “prose comic” from which the pictures are summoned by the magic of words, Goon Squad is set in a version of modern-day Manchester. Its biggest divergence from the real city is that it—along with most other large urban centers—has a team of superheroes to protect it against unusual threats with which the conventional forces of law and order would have problems.

    Goon Squad, Volume 3: Old Enemies is composed of: “Life during Wartime,” “Red Wolf, Red Wolf, Does Whatever a Red Wolf Can,” “Shadow of the Vivisector,” “The Man from Switzerland,” and “The End of the Year Show,” as well as an introduction read by the author.

  • Moss Hart’s Act One, which Lincoln Center Theater presented in 2014 as a play written and directed by James Lapine, is one of the greatest American memoirs—a glorious memorial to a bygone age filled with all the wonder, drama, and heartbreak that surrounded Broadway in the early twentieth century.

    Hart’s story inspired a generation of theatergoers, dramatists, and readers everywhere as he eloquently chronicled his impoverished childhood and his long, determined struggle to reach the opening night of his first Broadway hit. Act One is the quintessential American success story.

  • Originally published in 1962 and updated in later decades with a new introduction, Ellison Wonderland contains sixteen masterful stories from the author's early career. This collection shows a vibrant young writer with a wide-ranging imagination, ferocious creative energy, devastating wit, and an eye for the wonderful and terrifying and tragic. Among the gems are "All the Sounds of Fear," "The Sky Is Burning," "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman," and "In Lonely Lands." Though they stand tall on their own merits, they also point the way to the sublime stories that followed soon after and continue to come even now, more than fifty years later.

  • The Simeon Grist private-eye novels by 2011 Edgar and Macavity Award nominee Timothy Hallinan have become cult favorites, and here is the one that started it all.

    For a fee so big he can't turn it down, Simeon Grist is hired to watchdog the kind of guy he'd usually prefer to throw through the nearest window. Toby Vane is the golden boy of prime-time television, whose gee-whiz smile and chiseled features mask a dark secret that would take the shine off for his millions of adoring female fans: every now and then he beats up a woman, and almost any woman will do. When some of the women around Toby begin to turn up dead, Simeon has to figure out whether he's protecting a murderer—or whether one of Toby's multitude of enemies wants to put him away forever. And when Simeon meets the beautiful Nana, the whole situation becomes very personal, very fast.

  • "A man who has attained mastery of an art reveals it in his every action."—Samurai maxim

    Under the guidance of such celebrated masters as Ed Parker and the immortal Bruce Lee, Joe Hyams vividly recounts his more than twenty-five years of experience in the martial arts. In his illuminating story, Hyams reveals to listeners how the daily application of Zen principles not only developed his physical expertise but gave him the mental discipline to control his personal problems—self-image, work pressure, competition. Indeed, mastering the spiritual goals in martial arts can dramatically alter the quality of your life—enriching your relationships with people, as well as helping you make use of all your abilities.

  • 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.

  • Jim Harrison is one of our most renowned and popular authors, and his last novel, The Great Leader, was one of the most successful in a decorated career: it appeared on the New York Times extended bestseller list and was a national bestseller with rapturous reviews. His darkly comic follow-up, The Big Seven, sends Detective Sunderson to confront his new neighbors, a gun-nut family who live outside the law in rural Michigan.

    Detective Sunderson has fled troubles on the home front and bought himself a hunting cabin in a remote area of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. No sooner has he settled in than he realizes his new neighbors are creating even more havoc than the Great Leader did. A family of outlaws, armed to the teeth, the Ameses have local law enforcement too intimidated to take them on. Then Sunderson's cleaning lady, a comely young Ames woman, is murdered, and black sheep brother Lemuel Ames seeks Sunderson's advice on a crime novel he's writing, which may not be fiction. Sunderson must struggle with the evil within himself and the far greater, more expansive evil of his neighbor.

    In a story shot through with wit, bedlam, and Sunderson's attempts to enumerate and master the seven deadly sins, The Big Seven is a superb reminder of why Jim Harrison is one of America's most irrepressible writers.

  • Have you ever wondered what it's like to live through a bioweapon attack or to have every aspect of your life governed by invisible ants? In Cory Doctorow's collection of novellas, he wields his formidable experience in technology and computing to give us mind-bending sci-fi tales that explore the possibilities of information technology—and its various uses—run amok.

    "Anda's Game" is a spin on the bizarre new phenomenon of "cyber sweatshops," in which people are paid very low wages to play online games all day in order to generate in-game wealth, which can be converted into actual money. Another tale tells of the heroic exploits of "sysadmins"—systems administrators—as they defend the cyberworld, and hence the world at large, from worms and bioweapons. And yes, there is a story about zombies too.

  • A History of the Future is the third thrilling novel in Kunstler's World Made by Hand series, an exploration of family and morality as played out in the small town of Union Grove.

    Following the catastrophes of the twenty-first century—the pandemics, the environmental disaster, the end of oil, the ensuing chaos—people are doing whatever they can to get by and pursuing a simpler and sometimes happier existence. In little Union Grove in upstate New York, the townspeople are preparing for Christmas. Without the consumerist shopping frenzy that dogged the holidays of the previous age, the season has become a time to focus on family and loved ones. It is a stormy Christmas Eve when Robert Earle's son Daniel arrives back from his two years of sojourning throughout what is left of the United States. He collapses from exhaustion and illness, but as he recovers, he tells the story of the break-up of the nation into three uneasy independent regions and his journey into the dark heart of the new Foxfire Republic centered in Tennessee and led by the female evangelical despot Loving Morrow. In the background, Union Grove has been shocked by the Christmas Eve double murder by a young mother of her husband and infant son. Town magistrate Stephen Bullock is in a hanging mood.

    A History of the Future is attention-grabbing and provocative but also lyrical, tender, and comic—a vision of a future of America that is becoming more and more convincing, and perhaps even desirable, with each passing day.