Showing results by narrator "Bronson Pinchot" in All Categories

At the turn of the 20th century, as the oppression of Russia's imperial rule takes its toll on Finland, the three Koski siblings - Ilmari, Matti and the politicized young Aino - are forced to flee. They settle among a community of Finns in Deep River - a town on the western edges of the United States. The brothers face the excitement and danger of pioneering this frontier wilderness. But while they are climbing and felling trees 100 metres high, Aino is organising the country's fledgling labour movements.

"I Scream Man”, a story by Robert McCammon, was originally published in the Winter 1984 edition of The Horror Show.

In the near future, America is crumbling, bankrupt, and teetering on the edge of chaos. Following the Great Bailout, the multinational Lee-Pi corporation is the only institution that can hold the country together, providing basic services, security, and order. Leonard Cheung is Lee-Pi's most reliable field operative: a negotiator, assassin, and clean-up expert who does the behind-the-scenes dirty work to keep the corporation running.

Nate’s best friend Jeremy is missing, and Nate seems to be the only one worried that he’s been captured by hideous creatures that live in the sewers. A short story from Guys Read: Thriller, edited by Jon Scieszka...

“Absorbing...Eastman is a riveting...presence who demands to be loved and remembered.” —The Boston Globe An ambitious new novel set in the literary world of 1970s New York, following a washed-up writer in an errant quest to pick up the pieces of his life. One of Esquire's Best books of...

There’s nothing better than taking your timid little cousin Thad to one of those sweet haunted houses the 4-H Club decorates for Halloween. Except, of course, if the house turns out to actually be haunted. A short story from Guys Read: Thriller, edited by Jon Scieszka...

Back in the Eighties, Mickey DeFalco was America's teenage heartthrob with spiky gelled hair, slanted sideburns, and a number-one hit single - "Sweet Days" - a sappy love song he wrote after his high school sweetheart, Lynn Mahoney, broke his heart. Now approaching middle age, Mickey is lucky to land a singing gig at a bar mitzvah. So the one-hit wonder-boy is making a different kind of comeback - returning to his old stomping grounds in Queens, living with his parents, and sleeping in his childhood bed. Just like in high school.

It's here: Volume One of the official Guys Read Library. Jon Scieszka's Guys Read initiative was founded on a simple premise: that young guys enjoy reading most when they have reading they can enjoy. And out of this comes a series that aims to give them just that. Ten books, arranged by theme...

From its official sanction in 1953 to its shutdown in 1973, the CIA clandestinely conducted methods of mind control on unwitting American and Canadian citizens. This covert and illegal operation, Project MKULTRA, eventually made national headlines upon the declassification of thousands of documents in 2001. Intrigued by the people empowered to enact such abuses and the legacy of such an operation, Scott O'Connor weaves the nuanced and compelling story of Henry March, a CIA agent forced to spearhead a series of insidious mind-control experiments in San Francisco.

In 1924, hoping to cure his illness, Franz Kafka traveled to a sanatorium in Kierling, Austria, run by a Dr. Hugo Hoffman. He would spend his last days there. In Robert Cohen’s story, we see the end of Kafka’s life through Dr. Hoffman’s eyes. The doctor attempts to decipher the dying man’s enigmatic communications, scribbled on scraps of paper, while being harried by Kafka’s friend, Klopstock, and a young woman who has fallen in love with the then-unknown writer. As the case progresses, the once-practical and upstanding doctor gets pulled deeper and deeper into his strange patient's world.

Hamilton Speke is a successful playwright and composer - an extraordinary creative force. He lives and works on an estate south of San Francisco, secure in a woodland sanctuary where, to his surprise, he receives a visitor from his past, an old friend and former partner. Then everything changes. Speke's life of celebrity and vision is ruptured by bloodshed and insanity in a world where it's revealed that no one, and no career, is far from danger.

San Francisco architect Stratton Fields has just discovered that a contest was rigged against him and that the man who engineered the cheat, Ty DeVere, is determined to keep Stratton from success. But when Stratton's enemies, including Ty, start dying mysteriously - and Stratton encounters several apparitions - he wonders if he unknowingly made a deal with a supernatural force. Or maybe he murdered these people himself and has no memory of his deeds.

Why did Cecil B. DeMille really bury the Pharaoh’s Palace set after he filmed The Ten Commandments in 1923? Fugitives Sebastian Vickery and Ingrid Castine find themselves plunged into the supernatural secrets of Los Angeles—from Satanic indie movies of the ‘60s, to the unquiet La Brea Tar Pits at midnight, to the haunted Sunken City off the coast of San Pedro . . . pursued by a Silicon Valley guru who is determined to incorporate their souls into the creation of a new and predatory World God.

Something weird is happening to the Los Angeles freeways—phantom cars, lanes from nowhere, and sometimes unmarked offramps that give glimpses of a desolate desert highway—and Sebastian Vickery, disgraced ex-Secret Service agent, is a driver for a covert supernatural-evasion car service. But another government agency is using and perhaps causing the freeway anomalies, and their chief is determined to have Vickery killed because of something he learned years ago at a halted Presidential motorcade.

New York. 1977. Be there when it explodes. It’s New Year’s Eve, 1976, and New York is a city on the edge. As midnight approaches, a blizzard sets in - and amidst the fireworks, an unmistakable sound rings out across Central Park. Gunshots. Two of them. The search for the shooter will bring together a rich cast of New Yorkers. From the reluctant heirs to one of the city's greatest fortunes to a couple of Long Island kids drawn to the punk scene downtown.

As Carolyn untangled the umbilical cord from around my neck and placed me on Lillian’s stomach, I watched my mother look down with an expression that conveyed both reassurance and unconditional joy at my arrival, albeit eight weeks early. I was too new to know about the capriciousness of a red-haired woman’s soul, how it was governed by its own laws and remained half empty no matter how many blessings were poured into it. Truth be told, maternal instincts were as far away from Lillian’s heart and mind as my father was from Interstate 30.

Scott O'Connor's novels have been hailed as "astonishing" (Library Journal), and "so insistently stirring, you want to lean in close to catch every word" (New York Times Book Review). Now, from the author of Untouchable and Half World comes A Perfect Universe, a piercingly emotional cycle of stories in the tradition of Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad and Annie Proulx's Close Range. Welcome to the often-overlooked corners of sun-bleached Los Angeles, where a teenaged bicycle thief searches for a kidnapped boy, a young musician emerges as the lone survivor of a building collapse, and an aging actor faces the erasure of his past.

Archer B. Hemsley and friends are back and yearning for adventure in this second beautifully told story from Nicholas Gannon. After two years, Archer B. Helmsley’s famous explorer grandparents are finally coming home. They had been missing – abandoned on an iceberg – and Archer and his...

At a remote farm, a group of old friends gather to catch up, sit by the fire, and forget about their overworked lives. But a long weekend in the country is not Joseph's idea of a good time - not when he's promised his ex-wife he'll use the occasion to talk to their troubled 14-year-old daughter, and not when the farm belongs to his former lover and her husband, Alex. Once best friends, Joseph and Alex are now estranged, with much left unspoken between them.

Archer B. Helmsley longs for adventure. But how can he have an adventure when he can’t even leave his house? Archer B. Helmsley has grown up in a house full of oddities and treasures collected by his grandparents, the famous explorers. Archer longs for grand adventures but ever since his...