Showing results by narrator "Will Tulin" in All Categories

When bounty hunter Duke LaGrange and his oft-inebriated Japanese-Irish ninja companion, Ishiro’shea, entered their favorite watering hole, Cyborg Joe’s Grill N’ Go & The Why Not Saloon, they had no idea that they would soon be gobbled up by an unhinged astral anomaly and deposited on an uncharted primitive world. Few things are worse than undeveloped planets, especially those that haven’t even made it to the soufflé stage. To top it off, this particular planet comes with its own insane ruler and an Orb That Controls Everything and Must Be Respected.

Funny Boy: The Richard Hunt Biography tells the life story of a gifted performer whose gleeful irreverence, sharp wit, and generous spirit inspired millions. Richard Hunt was one of the original main five performers in the Muppet troupe. He brought to life an impressive range of characters on The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock, and various Muppet movies, everyone from eager gofer Scooter to elderly heckler Statler, groovy girl Janice to freaked-out lab helper Beaker, even early versions of Miss Piggy and Elmo.

Ron Shaich is a business visionary who has been part of building three iconic restaurant brands: Au Bon Pain, Panera Bread, and now Cava. Along the way, he developed "fast casual," a $100 billion-plus segment of the industry. Now he reveals what he learned about entrepreneurship, running large enterprises, business transformation, and life itself. He illustrates these lessons with his experiences turning a small cookie store into 2,400 restaurants with $5 billion in revenue, delivering annual investor returns of 25% over two decades, and outperforming both Starbucks and Chipotle.

Le Corbusier famously said, "A house is a machine for living in." We now confront the litany of environmental challenges associated with the legacy of the architectural machine: a changing climate, massive species die-off, diminished air and water quality, and resource scarcities. Brook Muller offers an alternative: water-centric urban design that fosters sustainability, equity, and architectural creativity.

I want to shake the hand of the person who gunned down my father. He was a rotten b*stard. It's just a pity I didn't get to take his life myself. Now, with my father gone, I am the new Don of the Scarpetta family. A don's murder requires retribution, though, and when I take my rightful place, the means presents itself. She's small, innocent, and kept locked away by her brother Cassidy. I'm all about force and brutality, and I like to take what is mine. But even I can't just snatch the Princess from the head of the Irish mafia.

Valachi, the name of a rival mafia family, was the last word on my mother's dying lips. After years of careful deceit and planning, my moment of revenge has finally arrived. The head of the Valachi family has died, leaving his innocent daughter vulnerable. She is forced to take my hand in an arranged marriage. By the time she learns my true identity, it will be too late. As her new husband, I will have complete control over her. I am the enemy in her bed.

They say she is a mafia princess. But when Evie O'Hanlon's precious feet land on Irish soil, I realize everyone is wrong. She's not a princess but a Queen. A Queen I want to capture, play with, and then kill. You can't have competition, no matter how pretty the package is. And the package is very f*cking pretty—so much so that my plan to kill her weakens the closer I get. But my Queen isn't exactly innocent. She weaves her own dark and dangerous web for me, one she freely admits to.

The ink isn't dry on the contract for my arranged marriage when my first and only love comes back to town. The Pits demand five souls, turning men into monsters. I know this, as it took away my humanity when I was forced to kill my best friend. I lost not only him, but his sister and my lover—who can never discover the truth of her brother's death. I swore before I snapped his neck that I would find out who runs the Pits and bring them to their knees.

“Without stories, we cannot live well,” shares guest editor Min Jin Lee, describing how storytelling affects and nurtures readers. The Best American Short Stories 2023 features twenty pieces of short fiction that reflect a world full of fractured relationships, but also wondrous hope. A lifelong friendship may become a casualty of the Russia-Ukraine war. Rejected by his lover, a man seeks to reconcile with his family. Twitter users miraculously muster enough empathy to help a lost cat find a forever home.

From a plague in Athens during the Peloponnesian War in 430 BCE, to another in 540 that wiped out half the population of the Roman empire, down through the Black Death in the Middle Ages and on through the 1918 flu epidemic (which killed between 50 and 100 million people) and this century's deadly SARS outbreak, plagues have been a much more relentless fact of life than many realize. The legacy of epidemics, Brian Michael Jenkins observes, is not only one of lives lost but of devastated economies and social disorder, all of which have severe political repercussions.

Peter Fraenkel presents a practical, creative, integrative approach that combines action- and insight-oriented techniques to help last-chance couples manage conflict, modulate intense negative emotions, address power struggles, develop mutual compassion, and restore emotional intimacy and pleasurable connection. Special attention is paid to developing a collaborative therapeutic alliance when partners have little motivation for therapy or faith that it can be effective. Through engaging in "nonbinding experiments in possibility," partners can then better evaluate whether to "stay or go."

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic observations of the world around them.

“Short stories have to accomplish a nearly impossible magic trick: to introduce a world often much stranger than our own and make you care about it in a matter of pages,” writes R. F. Kuang in her introduction. “The most important part of this magic trick is just a willingness to get weird.” The stories in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 are brimming with bizarre and otherworldly premises.

The summer before his senior year in college, Greg Melville worked at the cemetery in his hometown, and thanks to hour upon hour of pushing a mower over the grassy acres, he came to realize what a rich story the place told of his town and its history. Thus was born Melville’s lifelong curiosity with how, where, and why we bury and commemorate our dead. Melville’s Over My Dead Body is a lively (pun intended) and wide-ranging history of cemeteries, places that have mirrored the passing eras in history but have also shaped it.

After years of waiting patiently in the shadows, I've finally come to claim what is mine. And that prize is Viviana Valachi, the youngest daughter of the Valachi Don. She is timid and obedient, everything her father raised her to be. But there is a fire in those Valachi eyes that is matched only by her brother, whom I hold captive. Azrael is on the move. No place or person is safe, even those I keep in golden cages.

Specialist Amanda Sumner is one of the first to make contact on the Earth-like planet Harp and discovers she's the only Earthling, who can hear the trees sing in the strange forest. Determined to remain and learn more of the planet’s secrets, Amanda sets out to become part of the elite Guild there....

The secretary of defense is dead, and no one is more shocked than Defense Policy Undersecretary Colt Garrett when he’s appointed by the president to the second-most powerful job in the world. While onboard USS Ronald Reagan in the Western Pacific, he must find and recover missing biological warheads hidden in South Korea before US efforts to bring peace to the region are derailed.

Eddie Graber’s dream of a sanctuary for rescued farm animals was about to come true when his partner backed out at the last minute. He needs help, he needs money, but most importantly, he needs to rediscover the belief in a higher purpose that brought him here in the first place. Samuel Miller worked hard to fit into his Amish community despite his clubfoot. But when his father learns Samuel is gay, he is whipped and shunned. With just a few hundred dollars to his name, Samuel responds to an ad for a farmhand.

My new boss is a former fighter pilot-and it should be illegal to be that hot. But this city-boy condo builder doesn't know the first thing about construction in a place like Kasper Ridge. Will hired me to oversee the renovation at the old Kasper Ridge Resort-a job that will make my company and guarantee that Papa can live comfortably to a very old age. I just need to keep my eyes on the prize. And the prize is not Will Cruz's ocean blue eyes or those rock-hard abs. Besides, all those muscles and that killer smile are temporary.

Holy hedgehogs! Everyone's favorite bounty hunting duo is back! Nova Texas' favorite son, Duke LaGrange, and his silent swordsman sidekick, Ishiro'shea, once again find themselves unceremoniously removed from Cyborg Joe's and deposited on a planet at the least opportune time. The only way for the tandem to escape the harsh world of Psitakki is for Duke to survive the most dangerous underground pit fighting tournament in the cosmos.