Showing results by narrator "Richard Poe" in All Categories

Through a series of letters, senior devil Slashreap trains his young protégé, Scardagger, to win an individual soul away from Heaven. As the devils plot their way to triumph, they reveal the spiritual dangers and risks we face in today’s society. Their frighteningly accurate perspective on issues such as contemporary technology and sexual mores is interwoven with timeless matters such as the power of prayer, the purpose of suffering, and the promises held out by Heaven… and Hell.

Thus begins one of the most famous poems in American history: Ernest L. Thayer’s "Casey at the Bat". When the powerful Mudville baseball team enters the ninth inning of their game behind by two runs, things seem pretty grim. And when the first two batters make outs, it looks like their best player, the mighty Casey, won’t even get a chance to win the game for them. Then, two unlikely players get hits, and suddenly the crowd is cheering as Casey strolls to the plate. Casey’s epic at-bat has delighted generations of listeners, young and old.

Hai Li Bu lives in a small Chinese village. Even though he is a good hunter, there is a drought, and he can no longer find enough food to feed the village. One day, while hunting deep in the forest, Hai Li Bu rescues the Dragon King of the Sea’s daughter. As a reward, Hai Li Bu is given the ability to understand the speech of animals. There is one condition - if Hai Li Bu tells anyone about his gift he will turn to stone. Soon Hai Li Bu is able to feed everyone again. Then the animals tell him a huge storm is coming that will destroy the village....

Known for his vivid imagery, provocative subjects, and charged prose, Paul Watkins has emerged as one of the most gifted writers of his generation. This powerful novel shimmers with lyrical descriptions of the seascape as it sounds the depths of memory and conscience. Seeing a man brutally murdered in his local hangout on the docks of Newport sends Paul Wedekind into a torturous reverie of his past.

Halifax had been in French Africa for five years, doing whatever foolhardy, dangerous thing Serailler ordered him to do. It was some time before he finally snapped, but when he did, he opened the throttle, eased back the stick, and lifted straight and high into a dream.

Every year upon arriving in Plobien, the small Breton town where he spends his summers, American writer Mark Greenside picks back up where he left off with his faux-pas-filled Francophile life. Mellowed and humbled, but not daunted (OK, slightly daunted), he faces imminent concerns: What does he cook for a French person? Who has the right-of-way when entering or exiting a roundabout? Where does he pay for a parking ticket? And most dauntingly of all, when can he touch the tomatoes?

The fiction and reportage included in The Last Carousel, one of the final collections published during Nelson Algren’s lifetime, was written on ships and in ports of call around the world, and includes accounts of brothels in Vietnam and Mexico, stories of the boxing ring, and reminiscences of Algren’s beloved Chicago White Sox, among other subjects. In this collection, not just Algren’s intensity but his diversity are revealed and celebrated.

In Entrapment and Other Writings - containing his unfinished novel and previously unpublished or uncollected stories, poems, and essays - Algren speaks to our time as few of his fellow great American writers of the 1940s and ’50s do, in part because he hasn’t yet been accepted and assimilated into the American literary canon, despite that he is held up as a talismanic figure.

As a mafia-like demon family trapped on Earth, the Youngbloods have seen their share of family drama...but it’s never been like this before. While they battle the secret society trying to destroy them, Petra Youngblood must choose who she loves most. Will her loyalty lie with her family or with Killian Irons, the human she’s fallen in love with, whose family is hell-bent on eradicating her own? Complicating matters further, a long-hidden secret is about to come to light. Ora Youngblood has been holding out on the clan.

The behind-the-scenes story of the quintessential film noir and cult classic, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity—its true crime origins and crucial impact on film history—is told for the first time in this riveting narrative published for the film's 80th anniversary. Authors Alain Silver and James Ursini tell the complete history of Double Indemnity in their latest and most provocative work on film noir: From the Moment They Met It Was Murder.

Henry Farber, a well-meaning psychiatrist, is forced into hiding when the nation’s chief executive—a narcissistic autocrat in his disastrous second term—is found dead on the consulting room couch. From an isolated bungalow, Farber sets out to clear his name while offering an intimate view of a flawed populist leader.

The last of John Steinbeck's play-novelettes,

Burning Bright was the author's final attempt after 1937's

Of Mice and Men and 1942's

The Moon is Down to create what he saw as a new, experimental literary form. Four scenes, four people: the husband who yearns for a son, ignorant of his own sterility; the wife who commits adultery to fulfill her husband's wish; the father of the child; and the outsider whose actions will affect them all.

Martin T. Manton was a corrupt federal appeals court judge in New York who was convicted in 1939 and sent to prison. At the time, this was a hugely important story: Manton was considered the highest-ranking judge in the United States after the nine Justices of the Supreme Court, and was nearly appointed to that august body in 1922. Yet his story has never been told in book-length form before, and never with the benefit of such exhaustive research.

The Youngbloods are a mafia-like demon family, sent as a sinister advance team to prepare Earth for an infernal invasion. But when something goes wrong, the demon invasion never comes and the Youngbloods are stuck on crappy Earth with the worst creatures in the world—each other. Petra Youngblood is the family’s hunter. Her job: to track and kill the annual human sacrifice that keeps the Youngbloods immortal. Otherwise, they will crumble to dust. But as Petra is hunting down this year’s sacrifice, a man named Killian Irons, she breaks the first demonic rule.

Over the course of four celebrated works of fiction and almost forty years, Richard Ford has crafted an ambitious, incisive and singular view of American life as lived. Unconstrained, astute, provocative, often laugh-out-loud funny, Frank Bascombe is, here, once more our guide to the great American midway. Now in the twilight of life, a man who has occupied many colourful lives — sportswriter, father, husband, ex-husband, friend, real estate agent — Bascombe finds himself in the most sorrowing role of all; caregiver to his son, Paul, diagnosed with ALS.