Showing results by narrator "Brandon Massey" in All Categories

The night before the dance performance that could determine Gracie Wilder’s career, her father unexpectedly dies, leaving behind a curious gift with ties to a myth told to her as a child. Desperate to understand her father’s unspoken words, she puts her greatest dream on the line for an opportunity to remember the childhood she tried so hard to forget.

In ancient Athens, thousands would attend theatre festivals that turned writing into a fierce battle for fame, money, and laughably large trophies. While the tragedies earned artistic respect, it was the comedies - the raunchy jokes, vulgar innuendo, outrageous invention, and barbed political commentary - that captured the imagination of the city.

The story of America is the struggle between our liberal ideal and illiberal resistance. Donald Trump catalyzed a reactionary revolution by tapping into the dark, shadowy side of American democracy that embraces exclusion and inequality. Throughout American history these alarming impulses have come to the forefront of our culture — during the Civil War, the era of the Robber Barons, and the Civil Rights Movement — but have now come to fruition in the presidency of Donald Trump.

Real musicians don’t sign autographs, date models, or fly in private jets. They spend their lives in practice rooms and basement clubs or toiling in the obscurity of coffee-shop gigs, casino jobs, and the European festival circuit. The 10 linked stories in Power Ballads are devoted to this unheard virtuoso: the working musician. From the wings of sold-out arenas to hip-hop studios to polka bars, these stories are born out of a nocturnal world where music is often simply work, but also where it can, in rare moments, become a source of grace and transcendence, speaking about the things we never seem to say to one another.

Heraclix was dead and Pomp was immortal. That was before Heraclix’s reanimation (along with the sewn-together pieces and parts of many other dead people) and Pomp’s near murder at the hands of an evil necromancer. As they travel from Vienna to Prague to Istanbul and back again (with a side-trip to Hell), they struggle to understand who and what they are: Heraclix seeks to know the life he had before his death and rebirth, and Pomp wrestles with the language and meaning of mortality.

Charming, wealthy Randle Kennedy has a secret: he's British Columbia’s most prolific producer of boutique marijuana. He’s developed strains of B.C. Bud to please the most sophisticated palates and produce any desired effect, from a light contemplative buzz to the most mind-warping stone. His medical varieties offer relief for conditions ranging from cancer to Alzheimer's disease. Come legalization, he'll be the first on the market with marijuana's answer to single-malt Scotch.

Russ Bryant, a lonely and downtrodden reporter trapped in a job he hates, stumbles onto the story of a lifetime when he is befriended by Casey Fox, a promising rookie catcher on the local minor league team. Possessed of mythic talents but mortal insecurities, Casey isn’t even sure he wants to play in the major leagues (and unless he improves his attitude toward the team’s management, he may never get the option). Still, when circumstances in Boston lead to an offer from the Red Sox, the lure proves irresistible, and Casey moves on the fast track from the anonymity of the minor leagues to stardom at Fenway Park.

Rafael Yglesias completed this novel, his first, at the age of sixteen. The largely autobiographical story follows a New York prep school dropout yearning for freedom and authenticity. On its release the book was hailed as a next-generation Catcher in the Rye. But protagonist Raul Sabas comes of age in a very different New York than Holden Caulfield - a tumultuous and radicalized city following the student takeover of Columbia University and assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Madison Smartt Bell’s celebrated debut story collection about the daily struggles of life in America. Engrossing and brimming with insight, Bell’s early stories are remarkable for their ambition of scope and the author’s deft rendering of human diversity.

The story opens in the Virgin Islands. Rob McKenna is a good man who has lost much: His beloved daughter was killed the year before. McKenna's wife leaves him, forcing him to take on a crewmember, Tom Cain, to help sail the boat back to Boston. But Cain brings trouble on board and forces McKenna to make a desperate choice. "Do this one thing," Cain says. "Do this and you'll have a life." All McKenna has to do is lie. And soon... kill.

David Holbrook is a scrawny kid, the victim of bullies, and the neglected son of insane parents. David Holbrook is the Kallis Episkopos, a vicious murderer turned imprisoned leader of a death cult dedicated to Eris, the Hellenic goddess of discord. David Holbrook never killed anyone, and lives a lonely and luckless existence with his aging mother in a tumbledown New Jersey town. Caught between finger and trigger, David is given three chances to decide his fate as he is compelled to live and relive all his potential existences, guided only by the dark wisdom found in a bottle of cough syrup.

Living in St. Jude, a 110-year-old dying city on the edge of the Mississippi, is tough. But when a letter informs 14-year-old Cinque Williams of the passing of the father he never met, he is faced with an incomplete past and an uncertain future. A curse meant for his father condemns Cinque to a slow death even as it opens his eyes to the strange otherworld around him. With help from the ghost Willy T, an enigmatic White Woman named Iku, an African Loa, and a devious shape-shifter, Cinque gathers the tools to confront the ghost of his dead father. But he will learn that sometimes too much knowledge can be dangerous.

The Agile City engages the fundamental question: what to do about it? Journalist and urban analyst James S. Russell argues that we'll more quickly slow global warming - and blunt its effects - by retrofitting cities, suburbs, and towns. The Agile City shows that change undertaken at the building and community level can reach carbon-reduction goals rapidly. Adapting buildings (39 percent of greenhouse-gas emission) and communities (slashing the 33 percent of transportation related emissions) offers numerous other benefits that tax gimmicks and massive alternative-energy investments can't match.

In The Good Neighbor, Rory Fallon is walking his dog along the streets of the exclusive Venetian Vistas neighborhood when he notices activity at the house next door. New neighbors have arrived in the form of Austin and Meg Harden, along with their two children. Before long, the Hardens and Rory and his partner Bruno have formed a strange, sometimes symbiotic relationship, bringing up questions of love and marriage, trust and temptation.

Freedom Flyers brings to life the legacy of a determined, visionary cadre of African American airmen who proved their capabilities and patriotism beyond question, transformed the armed forces - formerly the nation's most racially polarized institution - and jump-started the modern struggle for racial equality.

Pete Axthelm follows the 1969 - 70 season of the New York Knicks and provides a parallel focus on basketball as it was then played in the black neighborhoods of New York City. Throughout, he writes clearly, intelligently, and passionately about the game, bringing alive the players’ efforts, accomplishments, and failures.

How big was the pressure? How deep was the division? Those were the questions that would beg answering long after the Chicago Bulls had completed their strife-ridden 1997-98 season in the National Basketball Association. Blood on the Horns details the infighting and conflict between Jordan, coach Phil Jackson, teammate Scottie Pippen and the team's general manager, Jerry Krause, and managing partner, Jerry Reinsdorf.

After an unexpected turn flushes his chosen career down the toilet, Dex Sanders is struggling to make ends meet as a used car salesman. Despite the drudgery of the job, he manages to put on a brave face for his wife, Reagan, and their two boys, until the day an unsettling encounter with a stranger coincides with a mysterious package appearing on their doorstep. Later that night, Dex and his family are abducted by a group of armed men and taken to an underground bunker, where Dex is tortured.

Matt Connell, a formerly successful literary agent who’s been in prison for four years for a crime of passion—homicide by strangulation after learning his wife slept with a friend—receives an early release from Sing Sing to join an FBI undercover investigation of multiple murders in Manhattan. Killings continue to mount as Matt does his best to calm his “Ferrari brain”—a condition in which his mind accelerates wildly into negative thoughts and worst-case scenarios—even as he falls in love with a suspect, then discovers disturbing truths about his past and hers.