Showing results by narrator "Jefferson Mays" in All Categories

In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized America's imagination. A "spirit photographer", William Mumler took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of a lost loved one alongside the living subject. Mumler was a sensation. Peter Manseau brilliantly captures a nation wracked with grief and hungry for proof of the existence of ghosts and for contact with their dead husbands and sons. It took a circus-like trial of Mumler on fraud charges to expose a fault line of doubt and manipulation.

Savaged by critics for its supposed profanity and obscenity and bought in large numbers by readers eager to see whether it lived up to its lurid reputation, The Monk became a success due to scandal when it was published in 1796 - not least because its author was a member of parliament and only 20 years old.

Critics have used every possible superlative to praise the works of two-time Man Booker Prize winner Peter Carey. In The Chemistry of Tears, Carey continues to astound with a story of love, death, and human invention. Museum curator Catherine’s affair comes to an abrupt end with her married lover’s untimely death. Denied outward grief by the nature of their relationship, Catherine retreats into isolation. Delving into notebooks more than a century old, she feels a growing connection to Henry Brandling, who in 1854 gave life to a mechanical creature.

America's favorite writing coach returns with a guide to writing clearly and honestly in a world full of lies, propaganda, and misinformation. The darker and more dystopian the future appears, the more influential public writers become. But with so much content vying for our attention, and so...

A novella set in the universe of James S. A. Corey's New York Times best-selling Expanse series, now a Prime Original series. This story will be available in the complete Expanse story collection, Memory's Legion.

FBI Special Agent A.X.L. Pendergast always wants to protect his protegee Constance Greene from harm. But, against all odds, Constance has found a way to travel back in time to New York City in the late 1800s to embark on a dangerous quest: to stop the era's most infamous serial killer, Dr. Enoch Leng from bringing his plans to fruition. If she does, she can finally prevent the events that led to the shocking deaths of her sister and brother. Meanwhile, in present-day New York, Agent Pendergast is desperate to reunite with Constance before she gets stuck in the past forever..

The Turn of the Screw is a fireside tale of evil and mystery. Filled with extraordinary drama, Henry James' story has been widely popular ever since its publication in 1898. It also inspired a film, a play, and an opera. A governess has been hired to care for two orphaned young children in their uncle's English country home. But soon after she meets the boy and his sister, the governess begins to see fearful apparitions.

Everyone in Cape Cod thinks that Mother is a wonderful woman: pious, hardworking, frugal. Everyone except her husband and seven children. To them she is a selfish and petty tyrant, endlessly comparing her many living children to the one who died in childbirth, keeping a viselike hold on her offspring even as they try to escape into adulthood. Welcome to Mother Land: a suffocating kingdom of parental narcissism.

On the seedy side of Chicago nightlife in the 1930s, Joey Evans is a poor man's Bing Crosby - a big-talking small-time nightclub crooner down on his luck but always on the make. In slangy, error-littered letters signed "Pal Joey", he recounts his exploits with brash nightclub managers, shady business partners, and every pretty girl he meets. Charismatic yet conniving, Pal Joey is a smooth operator whose bravado and big ideas disguise a far less self-assured soul caught up in the rags-to-riches dream of the Jazz Age.

When Mitya was two years old, he swallowed his grandmother’s sewing needle. For his family, it marks the beginning of the end, the promise of certain death. For Mitya, it is a small, metal treasure that guides him from within. As he grows, his life mirrors the uncertain future of his country, which is attempting to rebuild itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union, torn between its past and the promise of modern freedom. Mitya finds himself facing a different sort of ambiguity: is he a boy, as everyone keeps telling him, or is he not quite a boy, as he often feels?

On the morning of August 23, 1973, a man wearing a wig, makeup, and a pair of sunglasses walked into the main branch of Sveriges Kreditbank, a prominent bank in central Stockholm. He ripped out a submachine gun, fired it into the ceiling, and shouted, "The party starts!" This was the beginning of a six-day hostage crisis - and media circus - that would mesmerize the world, drawing into its grip everyone from Sweden's most notorious outlaw to the prime minister himself.

Ellis Hock runs a menswear store in Massachusetts but still dreams of the four years he spent in Malawi. When his wife leaves him, he realises that there is only one place for him to go: back to Malawi, where he can be happy again.

Jason Taverner has a glittering TV career, millions of fans, great wealth and something close to eternal youth. He is one of a handful of brilliant, beautiful people, the product of top-secret government experiments forty years earlier. But suddenly, all records of him vanish. He becomes a man with no identity, in a police state where everyone us closely monitored. Can he ever be rich and famous again? Or was that life just an illusion?

The essential guide to crafting the winning college admissions essay that only you could write, from America’s favorite writing coach. Most high school students never have received any instruction in how to write a personal essay. Yet at a time when getting admitted to their dream college is...

Blending reality and illusion with elegance and precision, the stories in this collection - one of Calvino’s earliest - take place in a World War II era and postwar Italy tinged with the visionary and fablelike qualities that would come to define this master storyteller’s later style. A trio of gluttonous burglars invade a pastry shop; two children trespass upon a forbidden garden; a wealthy family invites a rustic goatherd to lunch, only to mock him.

In the most ingenious and provocative thriller yet from acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Jeffery Deaver, a conscience-plagued mobster turned government hitman struggles to find his moral compass amid rampant treachery and betrayal in 1936 Berlin. Paul Schumann, a German American...

Having travelled back in time to Victorian-era New York City to save her siblings, Constance Greene confronts Manhattan’s most dangerous serial killer, Dr. Leng, but she is betrayed and left incandescent with rage. Agent Pendergast is determined to assist Constance, who is now on a fanatical quest for vengeance. And Diogenes, Pendergast's brother, also takes a trip out of his own time, offering to help the duo for unexplained reasons of his own.

Hades, god of the dead, welcomes listeners on a dangerous tour of his underworld kingdom, filled with monsters, furies, giants, and vampire demons. Along the way, he reveals ancient death rites and sinister curses, tells hair-raising stories, and cracks jokes to die for. With his witty voice and ghoulish sense of humor, Hades is the perfect guide through this fresh and imaginative work of nonfiction that unfolds like a novel. Includes a glossary, bibliography, and index.

Brought to you by Penguin. THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ALEX CROSS IS GOING HOME. BUT WHAT WILL HE FIND WHEN HE GETS THERE? When his cousin is accused of an unthinkable crime, Detective Alex Cross returns to his North Carolina hometown for the first time in over three decades. As he tries to...

French-born author Elena Mauli Shapiro vividly recreates Paris during World War I in this captivating novel. 13 Rue Thérèse follows Trevor Stratton, an American academic working in Paris who discovers a keepsake box dated back to the Great War. The box, Trevor discovers, belonged to a piano teacher named Louise Brunet. Inside it are mementos that give Trevor clues to Louise’s life, including the love she lost in the war and her affair with a neighbor. Mesmerized, Trevor begins to imagine what life was like for the mysterious Frenchwoman.