Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Short Stories

O. Henry wove several stories together into this highly episodic narrative, taking his title and inspiration from Lewis Carroll's ballad of the walrus and the carpenter in Through the Looking-Glass. The stories are set in the fictional country of Anchuria in Central America, a banana republic where larceny is rampant and revolution lurking in every impoverished back alley. O. Henry offers a cutting satire of contemporary politics and prejudices.

The "man of property", Soames Forsyte, has mellowed with the passing of the years until, in his old age, he is a patient and benign figure, guarding with especial tenderness the welfare of his daughter, Fleur. But all his watchfulness and devotion are powerless to avert tragedy when Fleur revives her old love affair with Jon Forsyte on Jon's return to England with his American wife.

In "College Town 1980", young people adrift in Ann Arbor, Michigan, debate the meaning of personal strength at the start of the Reagan era; in the urban fairy tale "Mirror Ball", a young man steals a girl's soul during a one-night stand; and in "The Little Boy", a woman haunted by the death of her husband is finally able to grieve through a mysterious encounter with a needy child.

Released one year after the publication of The King in Yellow - a milestone of supernaturalfiction - Robert W. Chambers’ title story of this short-story collection isconsidered one of his finest weird tales. It is followed by a series ofromantic art nouveau stories. Chambers’ love of natural scenery, symbolicanimal figures, and ghostly imagery are on full display as he weaves hischaracters through these otherworldly tales.

In the underground tunnels below Grand Central Terminal, Lee Stringer - homeless and drug-addicted for 11 years - found a pencil to run through his crack pipe. One day he used it to write. Soon writing became a habit that won out over drugs, and before long Stringer had created one of the most powerful urban memoirs of our time. With humane wisdom and a biting wit, Stringer chronicles the unraveling of his seemingly secure existence as a marketing executive and his odyssey of survival on the streets of New York.

This audiobook introduces Brown Dog, an ex-Bible student with raucously asocial tendencies who rescues the preserved body of an Indian chief from the depths of Lake Superior in a caper that nets a wildly unexpected bounty. Elsewhere, a band of 60s radicals reunite to free an old comrade from a Mexican jail. And a 50-year-old suburban housewife flees quietly from her abusive businessman husband and explores the bittersweet pageant of the preceding years within the sanctuary of an Iowa cornfield.

Culling the vastness of experience--from its bizarre fringes and breathtaking pinnacles to the mediocre and desperately below average--like an expert curator, Jim Shepard populates this collection with characters at once wildly diverse and wholly fascinating. A "black world" operative can't tell his wife a word about his daily activities, but doesn't resist sharing her confidences. A young Alpine researcher is smitten by the girlfriend of his dead brother, killed in an avalanche he believes he caused.

Fantasy icon Jane Yolen is adored by generations of readers and listeners of all ages. Now she triumphantly returns with this inspired gathering of fractured fairy tales and legends. Yolen breaks open the classics to reveal their crystalline secrets: a philosophical bridge that misses its troll, a spinner of straw as a falsely accused moneylender, the villainous wolf adjusting poorly to retirement. Each of these offerings features a new author note and original poem, illuminating tales that are old, new, and brilliantly refined.

A surreal love letter to this private side of the Met, Metropolitan Stories unfolds in a series of amusing and poignant vignettes in which we discover larger-than-life characters, the downside of survival, and the powerful voices of the art itself. The result is a novel bursting with magic, humor, and energetic detail, but also a beautiful book about introspection, an ode to lives lived for art, ultimately building a powerful collage of human experience and the world of the imagination.

This debut collection is a complicated love letter to Washington, DC, and to those who call it home: a TSA agent who's never flown, a girl braving new worlds to play piano, and a teacher caught up in a mayoral race. These characters navigate life's "training school" - with lessons on gentrification and respectability - and fight to create their own sense of space and self.

In 16 remarkable stories, Chaya Bhuvaneswar spotlights diverse women of color - cunning, bold, and resolute - facing sexual harassment and racial violence, and occasionally inflicting that violence on each other.

Town of Twenty Triggers opens this new trio of short novels by Les Savage Jr., marking their first appearance in book form. He was known only as the Joker, a portly, chuckling man with a bland smile, a poker face, and an amazing ability to make a deck of cards perform any trick he desired. His traveling companion is Emmet Pierce, a Texan fast with his gun. When this duo arrives in the small ranching town of Benton, the Joker is ready to take it over and claim it for his own.

These stories plunge the listener gently into another way of perceiving both the physical world and its elusive inhabitants. Her narrative is, by turns, naïvely whimsical and biblical in its assurance, and it speaks of what is partially remembered, partly divined. The memories often concern a childhood in the Caribbean - family, manners, and landscape - as distilled and transformed by Kincaid's special style and vision.

Sam Hunter is a bit of an animal. He's a former Twin Cities cop who lost his badge because of excessive force. Abusive husbands, child molesters, and other lowlifes wound up looking like they'd been mauled by a dog...or a wolf. Now Sam's a low-rent PI in Philadelphia. He takes the kinds of cases no one wants. His clients are usually on the fringes of society. The kind who are prey for all manner of predators - human and otherwise.

Previously part of a collection, this rare Ellery Queen mystery is available as a standalone audiobook for the first time. In Wedding Anniversary, Ellery returns to Wrightsville just in time to witness the poisoning of his kindly host, the jeweler Ernst Bauenfel. To solve the puzzle of Ernst's death, Ellery must carefully analyze the dying man's last words.

In Terror Town, the small New England town of Northfield is deftly sketched as the background for a series of violent deaths, all on the exact same spot: the muddy gravesite where the first body, that of a farmer's son, had been found.

A woman flees the hospital even as her infant son is breathing his last breaths. An aging construction worker comes to grips with the end of the only life he's ever known. A deadbeat father meets his son for the first time, only to be blindsided by the boy's birth defect. A man steals a corpse in order to give his father the burial he wanted.

This collection features seven tales inspired by America's colorful history, from colonial times to the early 20th century, including the Newbery Medal winner "The Matchlock Gun". In "The Matchlock Gun", young Edward must protect his family from marauding Indians when his father is called away. In "Two Logs Crossing", John Haskell spends two harsh winters fur trapping with a wise Indian to pay off his father's tremendous debt.

Tony Vlachic, a ruggedly handsome Navy SEAL, has kept his sexuality a secret for years under the threat of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". That is until he meets Adam Wyndham, a charismatic yet troubled film star. Tony knows that by approaching Adam in front of his teammates, he's jeopardizing his military career. And Adam, nursing a broken heart, has no interest in a relationship. Still, neither man can deny their instant attraction.

In this new collection of five short stories from New York Times best-selling author Jonathan Maberry, listeners get an eclectic sampling of the writer's work - from SF parody to murder mystery and beyond.