Showing results for "David Baker" in Literary Fiction

Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding knows Green Town, Illinois, is as vast and deep as the whole wide world that lies beyond the city limits. It is a pair of brand-new tennis shoes, the first harvest of dandelions for Grandfather's renowned intoxicant, the distant clang of the trolley's bell on a hazy afternoon. It is yesteryear and tomorrow blended into an unforgettable always. But as young Douglas is about to discover, summer can be more than the repetition of established rituals whose mystical power holds time at bay.

Ray Midge is waiting for his credit card bill to arrive. His wife, Norma, has run off with her ex-husband, taking Ray’s cards, shotgun, and car. But from the receipts, Ray can track where they’ve gone. He takes off after them, as does an irritatingly tenacious bail bondsman, both following the romantic couple’s spending as far as Mexico.

Allie Fox is going to re-create the world. Abominating the cops, crooks, junkies and scavengers of modern America, he abandons civilisation and takes the family to live in the Honduran jungle. There his tortured messianic genius keeps them alive, his hoarse tirades harrying them through a diseased and dirty Eden towards unimaginable darkness.

Audie Award, Literary Fiction, 2016. The story of Jack Crabbe, raised by both a white man and a Cheyenne chief. As a Cheyenne, Jack ate dog, had four wives, and saw his people butchered by General Custer's soldiers. As a white man, he participated in the slaughter of the buffalo and tangled with Wyatt Earp.

Ragle Gumm has a unique job: every day he wins a newspaper contest. And when he isn't consulting his charts and tables, he enjoys his life in a small town, in 1959. At least, that's what he thinks. But then strange things start happening. He finds a phone book where all the numbers have been disconnected, and a magazine article about a famous starlet named Marilyn Monroe, whom he's never heard of. Plus, everyday objects are beginning to disappear and are replaced by strips of paper with words written on them, like "bowl of flowers" and "soft-drink stand".

It's 1938 and women seeking a quick, no-questions split from their husbands head to the "divorce capital of the world," Reno, Nevada. There's one catch: they have to wait six weeks to become "residents." Many of these wealthy, soon-to-be divorcees flock to the Flying Leap, a dude ranch that caters to their every need. Ward spent one year at Yale before his family lost everything; now he's earning an honest living as a ranch hand. Admired for his good looks, Ward thinks he's got the Flying Leap's clients all figured out. But two guests are about to upend everything he thinks he knows.

Plain Heathen Mischief ups the existential ante, as Joel King, a defrocked Baptist minister, finds life even more bedeviling once he's served six months for a career-ending crime he might not even have committed. Now his incommunicado wife wants a divorce, the teenage vixen of his disgrace is suing him for a cool $5 million, a fresh start in Montana offers no hope for ex-cons of any religious persuasion, and the refuge provided by his sister turns as nasty as his parole officer. Talk about a crisis of faith.

Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut's shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, what these superb stories share is Vonnegut's audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.

After several years living abroad, the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2 - Richard Powers - returns to the US as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he runs afoul of Philip Lentz, a cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project: to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own name, sex, race, and reason for existing.

An American literary treasure, Charles Portis penned the Western classic True Grit. Set in the 1960s, Norwood is a picaresque romp taking audiences on a journey from Texas to New York and back again. An ex-marine, troubadour Norwood Pratt is on a mission to recover money he once loaned to a buddy in the service. Along the way, he gets into all manner of trouble involving stolen cars, beautiful women, and a chicken with a college education.

Earth is trapped in the crossfire of an unwinnable war between two alien civilizations. Its leader is perpetually on the verge of death. And on top of that, a new drug has just entered circulation—a drug that haphazardly sends its users traveling through time. In an attempt to escape his doomed marriage, Dr. Eric Sweetscent becomes caught up in all of it. But he has questions: Is Earth on the right side of the war? Is he supposed to heal Earth's leader or keep him sick? And can he change the harrowing future that the drug has shown him?

Exiled for 2,000 years God must retake the Earth from the clutches of his nemesis using a man caught between life and death as His vessel. God is in exile. The only man who can help is clinically dead. Herb Asher, an audio engineer by trade, is in suspended animation following a car accident that appears to have taken his life. As he floats in cryonic suspension he awaits his new spleen and dreams back through the last six years of his life which reveal much of his bizarre journey and the battle with Belial, the force of evil that will stop at nothing to achieve its goal.

A promising literary star makes his debut with this emotionally powerful saga, set in 1980s Maine, that explores family love, the power of myths and storytelling, survival and environmental exploitation, and the ties between cultural identity and the land we live on.

Paris, 1939: The pavement rumbles with the footfalls of Nazi soldiers marching along the Champs Elysees. A young writer, recently arrived from Ireland to make his mark, smokes one last cigarette with his lover before the city they know is torn apart. Soon he will put his own life and the lives of his loved ones in mortal danger by joining the Resistance....

When the Germans invade Belgium in 1940, chemistry professor André Sauverin fears the worst. His colleagues believe their social and political positions will protect them during the occupation, but André knows better. He has watched Hitler’s rise to power and knows the Nazis will do anything to destroy their enemies. For the Sauverins are Jews, non-practicing, yes, but that won’t matter to the Germans - or to the Belgians desperate to protect themselves by informing on their neighbors. And so André and his brother Alex take their parents, wives, and children and flee south.

Return to Oakpine spins a story of growing up and growing old as four high school friends and former bandmates reconnect 30 years after graduating. When they learn that one of them is dying, it feels like getting the band back together might be the most important thing they can do.

Children of the New World introduces listeners to a near-future world of social media implants, memory manufacturers, dangerously immersive virtual reality games, and alarmingly intuitive robots. Many of these characters live in a utopian future of instant connection and technological gratification that belies an unbridgeable human distance, while others inhabit a post-collapse landscape made primitive by disaster, which they must work to rebuild as we once did millennia ago.