Showing results by narrator "David Bendena" in All Categories

My best friend’s older brother is back in town. Do I care? Not one bit. Logan may have been my childhood crush, but I’ve always been little Tessa to him. Not to mention, he’s turned into a shallow flirt, and I’m not looking to get played again. What’s the problem, you ask? Thanks to a scheming mutual friend, Logan and I find ourselves embroiled in a bet of absurd proportions. Now, instead of ignoring Logan and keeping my heart safely locked away, we have a date every Saturday night and a kiss looming on the horizon. And the line between us is getting…muddy.

Cat is a wannabe merchant who specializes in procuring in-game valuables to sell for real money. He's a cunning trickster who wriggles his way out of trouble thanks to his quick wit and his trading talents, and his credo is “Anyone can be bought provided the price is right." He starts from scratch, using every opportunity to advance his plans. The first book in the Rogue Merchant series, The Starlight Sword is the story of this common trader’s rise to becoming the world’s newest legend, the most famous merchant in the entire Sphere of the Worlds

Do I want to move in with my ex-fiancé? No. But will it probably end up being a good thing? Also no. Because the truth is, I'm still in love with Jude Anthony. It doesn't matter that it's been years since we've spoken or that he was the one who walked out on me. It's hard to stay mad when I understand why he did what he did. But I need a place to stay, at least until I can find something new. So I'll keep my walls up, keep my distance, and everything will be fine. I'm sure Jude doesn't have feelings for me anymore, so there's nothing to worry about. My heart is perfectly safe.

They say that the Sphere of Worlds has no limits and that its players enter a new universe brimming with mysteries. And this universe is now readying to defend itself. Whoever has got involved in the game just can't stop anymore. In the search for the Keys, Cat and Weldy set off for the Abyss—the netherworlds of the Sphere—where Cat is about to play against the strongest of all the oracles: the legendary Demon King. And the stake in the game is horrendously simple: Cat's own life.

Firmly rooted in the modern American West, this story collection follows women and families who feel the instinctual, inexplicable pull of a home they must work to protect from the effects of economic inequity and climate catastrophe. A 74-year-old nun turns to eco-sabotage to stop a fracking project. A woman delivers her own baby in a Nevada ghost town. A young farmer hides her chicken flock from the government during a bird-flu epidemic. An ornithologist returns home to care for her rancher father and gets caught up trying to protect a breeding group of endangered sage grouse.

On January 22, 2003, four men stepped onto a stage in Brooklyn and did something no one else was doing at that time, in that place. They played rock 'n' roll: old-fashioned rock 'n' roll with skyscraping riffs and sloppy solos, topped with extraordinary lyrics about an out-of-focus America, blurred by pills and powders, of crime and fear and desperation and redemption. Twenty years later, The Hold Steady are one of America's most beloved rock bands. To mark those twenty years, The Hold Steady tell their full story.

Now that Cat has discovered his sword’s secret and received the task to collect the Seven Keys, he’s not in a hurry to complete the new quest. Why would he care about the future of the world when he has much more exciting things to do, like claiming his place in the clan, participating in the redistributing of trade influence, and just plain making money? Cat starts building his own trading empire—and ends up getting involved in an all-out economic war. Having gotten the taste of real money, he travels to the Bazaar, the world’s biggest marketplace at the crossroads of trade routes.

Twenty-five-year-old Linda Donovan has spent her life working for her father, Anthony, at Donovan and Daughter Exterminators in New York City. On the anniversary of her mother’s death, her father makes his annual visit to his late wife’s grave while Linda heads to a Park Avenue apartment building to work solo. When she arrives, she finds the body of an elderly resident, partially eaten by rats. The gruesome death not only speaks poorly of the Donovans’ exterminating services, it also points to foul play.

I didn’t ask to have a hopeless (and unrequited) crush on my best friend’s grumpy older brother. For years, I’ve had feelings for Luke Brooks, but it’s time to move on—I’m on a mission to find my perfect match and secure my very own happily-ever-after. But then one tiny mishap with a dating app lands me a new job: planning singles events for the whole town. It seems simple enough…until the town council forces Luke to play cupid with me.

Just as Jeremiah Goodbye is set to meet his fate in the electric chair, he is given a second chance at life. With the flip of a coin, he decides to return to his home town of Nowhere, Oklahoma, to settle the score with his twin brother Josiah. But upon his escape, he enters a world he doesn’t recognize—one that has been overtaken by the Dust Bowl. And the gift he once relied on to guide him is as unrecognizable as the path back to Nowhere.

With the help of Dan Morgan, an Infantry officer who deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan as a commander and operations officer, Eads takes listeners on a rollercoaster of combat experiences during the hunt for the most violent terrorist in Iraq, bringing to life the painstaking and horrid details of combat in a sectarian war. He tells the story of the soldiers’ camaraderie, built through adversity, and the love of family that sustained them.

With full cooperation from the late Gordon's family and based on his trademark extensive, detailed research, Joel Selvin’s account is at once an epic journey through an artist’s monumental musical contributions, a rollicking history of rock drumming, and a terrifying downward spiral into the unimaginable madness that Gordon fought a valiant but losing battle against. One of the great untold stories of rock is finally being told.

In the endless game of Sphere of Words, the trader named Cat continues searching for the Keys hidden by the dead creators of the virtual reality.

This full-cast performance of Dracula offers a new way to experience Bram Stoker's seminal vampire story, which follows Abraham Van Helsing's efforts to track down Lucy Seward after she becomes the victim of Count Dracula.

Meet Cat. He thinks everything has its price. You can pay in gold, or you pay in steel. And for the right price, even the entire Sphere of Worlds can be bought. Ever the merchant, he pays in souls, freeing the Goddess of Darkness in the astral fortress of Pandorum and becoming the archnemesis of the most powerful alliance in all of Sphere. Even as an enormous bounty is placed on his head with hunters trailing his every move, he never wavers. His patron, the God of Shadows, sends Cat to the twilight world of the Hole to find the third of the seven Keys.

Hi, I’m Dee, and I’m captain of the friend zone. I didn’t ask for this dubious honor, but don’t worry, I like it this way. I’m happy not dating and just being “one of the guys” on my volleyball team. At least I was until my scary new boss informs me that my job—I’m a developer at a dating app (ironic, right?) that I coded from scratch, an app that is essentially my baby—is in jeopardy. So I lie—tell him that I’m living proof the app works, because I’m engaged to a man I met on it. And who do I name as my lucky (fake) fiancé? My best friend, Noah Jackson.

Ten years ago, the small town of Bates, South Carolina, was changed forever with the appearance of a slip of paper. Six names. Six people set to die. Six months later, they were gone. But the list maker was far from done with their town. Like clockwork, new lists come out every six months. To keep their names off of them, the citizens go to extraordinary lengths and keep terrifying secrets. Someone is controlling their town. But who? And, most importantly, why?

Walter had spent all summer counting down the days until the first day of school. He couldn’t wait to make new shark friends and finally swim into his classroom for the first time. But the first class picture of the year changes everything. Walter realizes there is one big difference between him and his shark classmates. After his discovery, Walter spends his day trying anything he can think of to blend in with the other sharks, only to learn that the things that make us feel like we don’t fit in are the very things that make us stand out.

Pandorum is launching a massive offensive, aiming to destroy Cat and his clan. As they’re blazing through everything in their path, thousands of players clash in battle, and the biggest alliances of Sphere join the fray. Can Cat stay on the sidelines? After all, he’s able to buy and sell almost anything in the game—even victory itself. Cat fights his own war in economics and trade. Which role will the merchant play in a bloody war fated to go down in the history of the game as the Battle for the North?

In this new collection, Patrick Barb explores themes of family found and lost, media consumption and the dangers of runaway nostalgia, the supernatural in our lives, and the impact of violence in both the long- and short-term. From rural backwoods to Park Slope brownstones, Barb's characters face impossible, awful situations, testing their inner strength and understanding of reality. Covering quiet horror, weird fiction, supernatural horror, slasher horror, topical dark fiction, and more, these stories spotlight supposedly familiar terrors and fears in new and unexpected ways.