Showing results by narrator "T. Ryder Smith" in All Categories

Brought to you by Penguin. The Union-Congregate war rages onward and the Union's premier fighter pilots, the Homo Eridanus, start encountering deadly resistance from strange pilots on the Congregate side. Among wreckage, they find that new Congregate pilots aren't human, but Homo quantus, with...

There is no precedent in postwar American history for the destruction of the town of Paradise, California. On November 8, 2018, the community of 27,000 people was swallowed by the ferocious Camp Fire, which razed virtually every home and killed at least 85 people. Fire in Paradise is a dramatic and moving narrative of the disaster based on hundreds of in-depth interviews with residents, firefighters and police, and scientific experts.

The long years of near-utopia have come to an abrupt end. Peace and order are now figments of the past. Corruption, deception, and insurgency humwithin the once steadfast leadership of the Hives, nations without fixed location.

One of the country’s most-acclaimed and popular novelists offers a selection of a dozen short stories set in James Lee Burke’s most beloved milieu, the Deep South. “America’s best novelist” (The Denver Post), two-time Edgar Award winner James Lee Burke is renowned for his lush...

Putting It Together chronicles the two-year odyssey of creating the iconic Broadway musical Sunday in the Park with George. Through conversations between Lapine and Sondheim, as well as most of the production team, and with a treasure trove of personal photographs, sketches, script notes, and sheet music, the two Broadway icons lift the curtain on their beloved musical. Putting It Together is a deeply personal remembrance of their collaboration and friendship and the highs and lows of that journey, one that resulted in the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning classic.

The acclaimed, bestselling author of The Good German and Los Alamos returns with his most absorbing and accomplished novel yet—a mesmerizing tale of Hollywood, postwar political intrigue, and one man's determination to learn the truth about his brother's death. Hollywood, 1945. Ben Collier has...

Published in 2008, Massacre at Mountain Meadows was a bombshell of a book, revealing the story of one of the grimmest episodes in Latter-day Saint history, when settlers in southwestern Utah slaughtered more than 100 members of a California-bound wagon train in 1857. In this much-anticipated sequel, Richard E. Turley Jr. and Barbara Jones Brown examine the aftermath of this atrocity. Vengeance Is Mine documents southern Utah leaders’ attempts to cover up their crime by silencing witnesses and spreading lies.

Days ago, Belisarius pulled off the most audacious con job in history. He's rich, he's back with the love of his life, and best of all, he has the Time Gates, arguably the most valuable things in existence. Nothing could spoil this...except the utter destruction of his people and the world they lived on. To save them, he has to make a new deal with the boss he just double-crossed, to travel back in time and work his quantum magic once again, tracking down the source of the wormholes.

In 1937, there are recesses in Appalachia no outsiders have ever explored. Two government-sponsored documentarians from Cincinnati, Ohio - a writer and photographer - are dispatched to penetrate this wilderness and record what they find for President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. For photographer Clay Havens, the assignment is his last chance to reboot his flagging career. So when he and his journalist partner are warned away from the remote Spooklight Holler outside of town, they set off eagerly in search of a headline story.

Belisarius is a quantum man, an engineered Homo quantus who fled the powerful insight of dangerously addictive quantum senses. He found a precarious balance as a con man, but when a client offers him untold wealth to move a squadron of warships across an enemy wormhole, he must embrace his birthright to even try. In fact, the job is so big that he'll need a crew built from all the new sub-branches of humanity. If he succeeds, he might trigger an interstellar war, but success might also point the way to the next step of Homo quantus evolution.

When Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker’s art critic and the leading art writer of his generation, published his eye-opening autobiographical essay, “The Art of Dying,” in December 2019, he reported that he had lung cancer and had been given six months of life. Fortunately, his treatment was showing some improvement, and so, he wrote, “These extra months are a luxury that I hope to have put to good use.”

Robert Jackson Bennett makes a stunning debut with this deliciously dark tale sure to hold readers in its menacing thrall. The grinding poverty brought on by the Great Depression is nowhere more apparent than in the untold thousands looking for work along America’s railroad system. But one man haunting the rail camps has been moved by an entirely different brand of desperation: revenge.

Hurricane Matthew is a force to be reckoned with. It has been forecasted to drown the city of Houston in an unrelenting torrent of rain. In the days before its arrival, the city was evacuated, leaving behind only a skeleton police force and civilians unable to flee its destructive path. It’s the perfect time and the perfect place for the perfect crime.

Set in Mexico City during the early 50s, Queer follows William Lee's hopeless pursuit of desire from bar to bar in the American expatriate scene. As Lee breaks down, the trademark Burroughsian voice emerges; a maniacal mix of self-lacerating humor and the Ugly American at his ugliest. Burroughs' only realist love story, Queer is a haunting tale of possession and exorcism.

For years Chuck Palahniuk has reserved his best storytelling for his readings, often choosing to read a new short story instead of whatever novel he is supposed to be promoting. Make Something Up compiles these previously unpublished tales for the very first time, plus the Byliner social media insta-classic "Phoenix" and Palahniuk's most notable pieces from Playboy.

Klara and the Sun meets S. A. Barnes’s Dead Silence with a touch of Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built in Nebula Award-winning author A.D. Sui’s darkly philosophical murder mystery, as a death monk and a team of researchers trapped onboard a spaceship of the dead encounter something beyond human understanding....

In a future of near-instantaneous global travel, of abundant provision for the needs of all, a future in which no one living can remember an actual war, a long era of stability threatens to come to an abrupt end. For known only to a few, the leaders of the great Hives, nations without fixed location, have long conspired to keep the world stable, at the cost of just a little blood. A few secret murders, mathematically planned. So that no faction can ever dominate, and the balance holds. And yet the balance is beginning to give way.

Best known for his glorious comic novels, Charles Portis was also a prolific essayist, travel writer, and newspaper reporter. Now, for the first time, these writings—journalism, short fiction, memoir, travel stories, and even a play—have been brought together in Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany. The collection encompasses the breadth of Portis’s fifty-year writing career, covering topics as varied as road tripping in Baja, Elvis’s visits to his aging mother, and his own boyhood in Arkansas.

Five years ago, Coburn went to sleep - wasn't exactly planned - and he's just woken up to find most everybody in the world dead. And not cool, interesting dead like him; oh, no. Coburn looks basically human, and these guys...really don't. He likes blood, and they like flesh. He's smart; them, not so much. But they outnumber him by about a million to one, and their clotted blood cannot sustain him.

As investigators brought out the bagged remains of several dozen young men from a small Chicago ranch home and paraded them in front of a crowd of TV reporters and spectators, attention quickly turned to the owner of the house. John Gacy was an upstanding citizen, active in local politics and charities, famous for his themed parties and appearances as Pogo the Clown. But in the winter of 1978-79, he became known as one of many so-called “sex murderers” who had begun gaining notoriety in the random brutality of the 1970s.