Narrator

Robert Fass

Robert Fass
  • An enthralling debut, Above the Fire crystallizes the relationship between a father and son as they survive a winter of isolation. Perfect for fans of The Dog Stars by Peter Heller and The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

    Laboring under a shared loss, Doug and his young son, Tim, set out on a late-season backpacking trip through the White Mountains of New Hampshire. They find beauty and solidarity in the outdoors, making friends along the trail and falling into the rhythms of an expedition. But when reports of warfare and social collapse reach the ranger station, Doug—seeking to protect the only family he has left—withdraws even further into the backcountry.

    The alpine winter presents its own dangers, as father and son must endure the elements, the solitude, and the ever-present threat of outsiders. As their isolation intensifies, and the nature of the country’s disorder becomes more unsettling, their bond with each other grows more fierce. But as spring approaches, they must decide whether—and how—to confront the perils of a changed world.

  • In 1966, two authorities on LSD—Richard Alpert, PhD, AKA Ram Dass, and Sidney Cohen, MD—spoke out on the merits and dangers of the psychedelic drug as acclaimed photographer Lawrence Schiller documented the experiences as they were happening. This Commemorative Edition of LSD looks back at the public’s use of LSD in the 1960s and features a new introduction that explores the book’s relevance to today’s psychedelic renaissance.

  • He demanded the immediate dispatch of two suitably trained operatives to Salzburg. Extreme measures might be necessary.

    In 1945, with their thousand-year empire falling around them and the Allies on their heels, the Nazis hide a sealed chest in the dark, forbidding waters of the Finstersee—a lake surrounded by the brooding peaks of the Austrian Alps. There it lies for twenty-one years, almost forgotten, until a British agent decides to raise it from the depths. The secrets he uncovers are far-reaching and lethal, and in Salzburg, Bill Mathison, a New York attorney on the trail of a missing colleague, finds himself drawn into the shadowy underworld of international espionage. Not knowing who to trust amidst the chaos, he is drawn to two beautiful women, one of whom will betray him.

  • 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.

  • A collection of treasured stories by the unchallenged master of American fiction

    Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow has deservedly been celebrated as one of America’s greatest writers. For more than sixty years he stretched our minds, our imaginations, and our hearts with his exhilarating perceptions of life. Here, collected in one volume and chosen by the author himself, are favorites such as “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” “Leaving the Yellow House,” and a previously uncollected piece, “By the St. Lawrence.” With his larger-than-life characters, irony, wisdom, and unique humor, Bellow presents a sharp, rich, and funny world that is infinitely surprising. With a preface by Janice Bellow and an introduction by James Wood, this is a collection to treasure for longtime Saul Bellow fans and an excellent introduction for new readers.

  • Harry Trellman doesn’t belong. Not in the Chicago orphanage where he is sent by his mother, not in high school (too brainy), not even on the streets. Human attachments? Yes, he has them, but they are like everything else in his life, singular and irregular. People who know him say that he “drowns his feelings in his face,” and that he has a Mongolian “masked look.” But though Harry stands apart, he has always been a most keen observer, listener, recorder, and interpreter, and none of this is lost on the Chicago billionaire, Sigmund Adletsky, who takes Harry into his “brain trust.” He retains Harry to advise him. They discuss ordinary things—they gossip together. Old Adletsky has set feelings aside while he amassed his vast fortune. The old man is so apt that he divines the secrets behind Harry’s mask, and brings him together with the one person Harry has loved dumbly for forty years.

    Amy Wustrin has not exactly stood apart from the sexual revolution while waiting for Harry to come wooing. Far from remaining the static object of his fantasy, she has moved about in the real world, from one marriage to another, from rich to broke, from hot high-school girl to correct matron. Still, in Amy, Harry sees what he calls his “actual.” Harry has had his opportunities with Amy, but it is not until he finds himself at the cemetery with her for the exhumation and reburial of her husband that he feels free to speak out.

  • In the early 1970s, literary journals that contained Andre Dubus’ short stories were passed around among admiring readers. When his debut collection, Separate Flights, arrived in 1975, it was immediately celebrated and won the Boston Globe’s Laurence L. & Thomas Winship / PEN New England Award.

    The collection includes the novella We Don’t Live Here Anymore, which served as the basis for the 2004 film of the same title (nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival); the novella also introduces Dubus’ writer-protagonist Hank Allison, a character who continues to appear throughout his work.

    Two years later, the title story of Dubus’ sophomore collection Adultery and Other Choices continued the exploits of Hank Allison. “The title story alone will make it worth your while to go out and get the book,” wrote the New York Times Book Review.

    While the collection’s opening stories focus on the fragile nature of youth, later stories shift to darker struggles of adulthood, such as in “Andromache”—Dubus’ first story to appear in the New Yorker (1968)—which traces the aftermath of a tragic death during wartime.

  • While the title novella of Dubus’ Finding a Girl in America returns to the somewhat off-the-rails literary life of Hank Allison, the collection’s opening story strikes a much darker tone: “Killings”—the basis of the Academy Award–nominated film In the Bedroom—is a swift tale of revenge that leaves readers wondering what they might do in the name of family love.

    Dubus’ prowess with narrative compression is on full display in the story “Waiting”: the hollow ache experienced by a woman widowed by the Korean War took Dubus fourteen months to write and was more than one hundred pages in early manuscript form but spans a mere seven pages in published form.

    Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Joyce Carol Oates called “The Pretty Girl”—the opening novella of The Times Are Never So Bad—“the most compelling and suspenseful work of fiction [Dubus] has written.”

    Richard Russo’s introduction to this volume grapples with his complex feelings on reading Dubus’ work over many decades, but when it comes to the much-anthologized masterpiece “A Father’s Story,” Russo writes: “I won’t mince words. It’s one of the finest stories ever penned by an American.”

  • The Cross Country Runner brings together Voices from the Moon, his longest, most masterful novella, and The Last Worthless Evening, Andre Dubus’ fifth collection of short stories and novellas, along with previously uncollected stories and a new introduction by PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author Tobias Wolff.

    “‘It’s divorce that did it,’ his father had said last night.” So begins Voices from the Moon, the 126-page novella that shows Dubus at the height of his empathetic powers. Alternating between the viewpoints of Richie Stowe, a serious twelve-year-old who plans to become a priest, and the five other members of his family, the story takes place over the course of a single day.

    The four novellas and two stories of The Last Worthless Evening range further than those of any previous Dubus collection—racial tension in the navy, a detective-story homage, a Hispanic shortstop, the unlikely pairing of an eleven-year-old kid and a dangerous Vietnam vet.

    This third volume in the series also draws together for the first time many of Dubus’ previously uncollected stories, including work from the mid-1960s and the late 1990s. The earliest story appearing here in book form for the first time is “The Cross Country Runner,” which was originally published in the long-defunct Midwestern University Quarterly in 1966 when Dubus was thirty years old and only recently graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The final story—the Western-themed “Sisters”—is the last piece of fiction Dubus was working on when he died suddenly in 1999 at just sixty-three years old.

  • Selected testimonies to living history—speeches, letters, poems, songs—offered by the people who make history happen, but are often left out of history books: women, workers, nonwhites. Featuring introductions to the original texts by Howard Zinn.

    New voices featured in this 10th Anniversary Edition include Chelsea Manning, speaking after her thirty-five-year prison sentence; Naomi Klein, speaking from the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Liberty Square; a member of Dream Defenders, a youth organization that confronts systemic racial inequality; members of the Undocumented Youth movement, who occupied, marched, and demonstrated in support of the DREAM Act; a member of the Day Laborers movement; Chicago Teachers Union strikers; and several critics of the Obama administration, including Glenn Greenwald, on governmental secrecy.

  • 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.

  • The tight-knit residents of Blue Moon Mountain, nestled high in the Colorado Mountains, form an interconnected community of those living off the land, stunned by the beauty and isolation all around them. So when, at the onset of winter, the town veterinarian commits a violent act, the repercussions of that tragedy will be felt all across the mountainside, upending their lives and causing their paths to twist and collide in unexpected ways.

    The housecleaner rediscovering her sexual appetite, the farrier who must take in his traumatized niece, the grocer and her daughter, the therapist and the teacher, reaching out to the world in new and surprising ways, and the ragged couple trapped in a cycle of addiction and violence. They will all rise and converge upon the blue hour—the l’heure bleu—the hour of twilight, a time of desire, lust, honesty. The strong, spirited people of Blue Moon Mountain must learn to navigate the line between violence and sex, tenderness and the hard edge of yearning, and the often confusing paths of mourning and lust.

    Writing with passion for rural lives and the natural world, Laura Pritchett, who has been called “one of the most accomplished writers of the American West,” graces the land of desire in vivid prose, exploring the lengths these moving, deeply felt characters—some of whom we’ve met in Pritchett’s previous work—will traverse to protect their own.

  • From the winner of the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, an elegiac and lyrical novel about a young couple whose love—and everything they know to be true—is threatened by the arrival of an unwelcome stranger in their collapsing eastern Colorado town

    Bonnie Nadzam—author of the critically acclaimed, award-winning debut Lamb—returns with this scorching, haunting portrait of a rural community in a “living ghost town” on the brink of collapse, and the individuals who are confronted with either chasing their dreams or—against all reason—staying where they are.

    Lions is set on the high plains of Colorado, a nearly deserted place, steeped in local legends and sparse in population. Built to be a glorious western “city upon a hill,” it was never fit for farming, mining, trading, or any of the illusory sources of wealth its pioneers imagined. The Walkers have been settled on its barren terrain for generations—a simple family in a town otherwise still taken in by stories of bigger, better, brighter.

    When a traveling stranger appears one day, his unsettling presence sets off a chain reaction that will change the fates of everyone he encounters. It begins with the patriarch John Walker as he succumbs to a heart attack. His devastated son Gordon is forced to choose between leaving for college with his girlfriend, Leigh, and staying with his family to look after their floundering welding shop and, it is believed, to continue carrying out a mysterious task bequeathed to all Walker men. While Leigh is desperate to make a better life in the world beyond the desolation of Lions, Gordon is strangely hesitant to leave it behind. As more families abandon the town, he is faced with what seems to be a reasonable choice and the burden of betraying his own heart.

    A story of awakening, Lions is an exquisite novel that explores ambition and an American obsession with self-improvement, the responsibilities we have to ourselves and each other, and the everyday illusions that pass for a life worth living.

  • For two years, Walter Stackhouse has been a faithful and supportive husband to his wife, Clara. But she is distant and neurotic, and Walter finds himself harboring gruesome fantasies about her demise. When Clara’s dead body turns up at the bottom of a cliff in a manner uncannily resembling the recent death of a woman who was murdered by her husband, Walter finds himself under intense scrutiny. He commits several blunders that claim his career and his reputation, cost him his friends, and eventually threaten his life.

    The Blunderer examines the dark obsessions that lie beneath the surface of seemingly ordinary people. With unerring psychological insight, Patricia Highsmith portrays characters who cross the precarious line separating fantasy from reality.

  • Originally published in 1968 to critical acclaim, Russell H. Greenan's brilliant, audacious mystery novel It Happened in Boston? quickly became an underground sensation and has emerged over forty years later as a genuine cult classic.

    In this breathtakingly imaginative book—now appearing in audio for the first time—we enter the mind of an unnamed artist of prodigious talent and intelligence who is determined to correct the world's wrongs via a direct confrontation with the Almighty, no matter what the consequences. A spellbinding tale told by a memorably unreliable narrator, It Happened in Boston? places you inside a vivid world that brilliantly and surprisingly interweaves art, genius, love, madness, betrayal, God … and murder.

    In 2003 It Happened in Boston? was reprinted by the Modern Library with a new introduction by celebrated writer Jonathan Lethem and an afterword by the author, both included in this audio version.

    Cover design by Zoe Ann Lee

  • This superlative collection of futuristic tales explores ground-breaking supernatural themes from the founding heroes of the science-fiction genre. The short story form is perfect for capturing the atmospheric tension of these legendary stories.

    This collection includes the following stories:

    • "The Door in the Wall" by H. G. Wells—A man must choose between the rationality of science and the magic of imagination.
    • "All Cats Are Gray" by Andre Norton—A down-on-his-luck spaceman and a mysterious woman and her cat take off to explore and bring back a derelict ship said to hold great treasure.
    • "A Martian Odyssey" by Stanley G. Weinbaum—A four-man crew lands on Mars and makes a startling discovery.
    • "Victory" by Lester del Rey—A victorious captain returns to his home planet after an alien war and finds that victory has a very steep price.
    • "The Moon Is Green" by Fritz Leiber—On post-apocalyptic Earth, a woman comes face-to-face with humanity exposed to catastrophe.
    • "The Winds of Time" by James H. Schmitz—When the spaceship is battered by an unknown force, the pilot has to investigate—and what he finds could alter his life forever.
    • "The Defenders" by Philip K. Dick—Years after nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union has contaminated the Earth's surface, soldier robots continue the fight on humanity's behalf.
    • "Missing Link" by Frank Herbert—Lewis Orne is sent to investigate a missing ship and runs into "native" trouble on the planet Gienah III.