Showing results by narrator "Robert Fass" in All Categories

This stunning follow-up to Ellen Kushner's cult-classic novel Swordspoint is set in the same world of labyrinthine intrigue, where sharp swords and even sharper wits rule. Against a rich tapestry of artists and aristocrats, students, strumpets, and spies, a gentleman and a scholar will find themselves playing out an ancient drama destined to explode their society's smug view of itself - and reveal that sometimes the best price of uncovering history is being forced to repeat it....

First published in 1967, Stop-Time was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of modern American autobiography, a brilliant portrayal of one boy’s passage from childhood to adolescence and beyond. Here is Frank Conroy’s wry, sad, beautiful tale of life on the road; of odd jobs and lost friendships, brutal schools and first loves; of a father’s early death and a son’s exhilarating escape into manhood.

On a rainy November day, police detectives Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein are summoned to a mysterious traffic accident: a woman has fallen from a pedestrian bridge onto a car driving underneath. According to a witness, the woman may have been pushed. The investigation leads Pia and Oliver to a small village, and the home of the victim, Rita Cramer. On a September evening eleven years earlier, two seventeen-year-old girls vanished from the village without a trace.

As a young adult in wartime Vienna, Georg Rauch helped his mother hide dozens of Jews from the Nazis behind false walls in their top-floor apartment and arrange for their safe transport out of the country. His family was among the few who worked underground to resist Nazi rule. Then came the day he was shipped out to fight on the eastern front as part of the German infantry—in spite of his having confessed his own Jewish ancestry.

So begins this suspenseful, impeccably researched history that draws on new access to diaries to tell the story of three men who were intimately involved with America’s decision to drop the atomic bomb—and Japan’s decision to surrender. They are Henry Stimson, the American Secretary of War, who oversaw J. Robert Oppenheimer under the Manhattan Project; Gen. Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, head of strategic bombing in the Pacific, who supervised the planes that dropped the bombs; and Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo.

From Cixin Liu, the New York Times best-selling author of The Three-Body Problem, To Hold Up the Sky is a breathtaking collection of imaginative science fiction.

For years, Inspector Richard Queen had been outshone by his writer son. Now, with Ellery away, he had a case all his own - or did he? The verdict had been accidental death, and only the victim's nurse had seen the one thing that made it murder. Recruiting a senior citizens corps of retired cops, Dick Queen tracked a murderer - and found himself courting his only witness! No wonder he kept muttering, "What's Ellery going to say…?"

In his Locus review of Two Worlds and in Between - the first volume of The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan - Gary K. Wolfe wrote, “...it makes you wish the second volume were here now.” Well, the long wait is over. This second volume completes this ambitious undertaking, collecting the finest of Kiernan’s stories from 2004 to 2012, selected by the author herself. The book includes 25 short stories and one poem, plus the short novel Black Helicopters - more than 200,000 words of fiction, including the World Fantasy Award-winning “The Prayer of 90 Cats”.

Calvin Trillin has reported serious pieces across America for The New Yorker, covered the civil rights movement in the South for Time, and written comic verse for The Nation. But one of his favorite subjects over the years—a superb fit for his unique combination of reportage and humor—has been his own professional environment: the American press.

In the dynamic and dangerous Vienna of 1903, a brilliant psychoanalyst and a brave detective battle to catch criminals who commit the most clever and brutal crimes. Detective Inspector Oskar Reinhardt finds that young women are being slain in an unnerving - and ingenious - manner, with a small, almost undetectable, hat pin. For Dr. Max Liebermann, the killer is unique in the annals of psychopathology, one who murders in the midst of consensual love. Is the culprit a patient?

In July 1776 a pair of Franciscan friars, Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Velez de Escalante, were charged by the governor of New Mexico with discovering a route across the unknown Southwest to the new Spanish colony in California. They had other goals as well, some of them secret: converting the indigenous natives along the way to the true faith, discovering a semi-mythical paradise known as Teguayo, hunting for sources of gold and silver, and paving the way for Spanish settlements from Santa Fe to Monterey. In strict terms, the expedition failed.

Thought of as the seat of our soul, then as a mysteriously animated object, the heart is still more a mystery than it is understood. Why do most animals only get one billion beats? (And how did modern humans get to over two billion - effectively letting us live out two lives?) Why are sufferers of gingivitis more likely to have heart attacks? And what does it really feel like to touch your own heart, or to have someone else's beating inside your chest?

In a world where the human population has suffered devastating losses, a handful of survivors cling to what passes for life in a postapocalyptic, dying landscape. A world where humans wander, drugged and lulled by electronic bliss. A dying world of no children and no art, where reading is forbidden.

The revolutionary New York Times best seller about powerful lifestyle changes that can fight and prevent cancer - an integrative approach based on the latest research.

A mouthwatering testament to the healing power of food, My Place at the Table is a moving coming-of-age story of how a gay man emerges from a wounding childhood, discovers himself, and finds love. Published here for the first time is Lobrano’s “little black book,” an insider’s guide to his thirty all-time-favorite Paris restaurants.

In this characteristically turbocharged new book, celebrated Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi provides an insider's guide to the variety of ways today's mainstream media tells us lies. In the internet age, the press have mastered the art of monetizing anger, paranoia, and distrust. Taibbi, who has spent much of his career covering elections in which this kind of manipulative activity is most egregious, provides a rich taxonomic survey of American political journalism's dirty tricks.

In R. J. Palacio's best-selling collection of stories, Auggie & Me, which expands on characters in Wonder, audiences were introduced to Julian's grandmother, Grandmère. Here, Palacio presents Grandmère's heartrending story: how she, a young Jewish girl, was hidden by a family in a Nazi-occupied French village during World War II; how the boy she and her classmates once shunned became her savior and best friend.

Lincoln's Citadel is a fresh, absorbing narrative history of Lincoln’s leadership in Civil War Washington. Here is the vivid story of how the Lincoln administration met the immense challenges the war posed to the city, transforming a vulnerable capital into a bastion for the Union.

Christopher Golden's Ararat is the heart-pounding tale of an adventure that goes wrong - on a biblical scale. When an earthquake reveals a secret cave hidden inside Mount Ararat in Turkey, a daring, newly engaged couple are determined to be the first ones inside...and what they discover will change everything. The cave is actually a buried ancient ship that many quickly come to believe is Noah's Ark. When a team of scholars, archaeologists, and filmmakers make it inside the ark, they discover an elaborate coffin in its recesses.

The Best American Short Stories 2021 immerse the listener in powerfully imagined worlds and allowing them to bring some of that power into their own lives. From a stirring portrait of Rodney King’s final days to a surreal video game set in the Middle East, with real consequences, to an indigenous boy’s gripping escape from his captors, this collection renders profoundly empathetic depictions of the variety of human experience.