Showing results by narrator "Natasha Soudek" in All Categories

Luckily for humanity, scientist Marie Curie applied her brilliant mind and indomitable spirit to expanding the frontiers of science, but what if she had instead drifted toward the darkness? At the cusp of between child- and adulthood, at the crossroads between science and superstition, a teen Marie Curie faces the factual and the fantastic in this fabulous collection of stories that inspire, delight, and ask the question: What if she had used her talents for diabolical purposes?

In 1945, Ditha Bruncel was living with her parents in the small town of Lossen, in Upper Silesia. Close Jewish friends had vanished, swastikas hung from every building, and neighbors were disappearing in the middle of the night. At the same time, more than fifteen hundred British and Commonwealth airmen were being marched out of Stalag Luft VII. Twenty-three of these prisoners managed to escape from the marching column—and by chance hobbled into Lossen. One among them, Warrant Officer Gordon Slowey, was the man Ditha was destined to meet and fall in love with.

A short story magazine that assembles a thrilling new mix of stories from genres including horror, science-fiction, comedy, and suspense. Buried at the heart of every story in the magazine is a unique artifact, an object that has inspired our storytellers to create a big idea, an irresistible question, a new immersive world, or a sense of wonder. Unearth your next great story with Assemble Artifacts.

“One of Mexico’s greatest living writers,” wrote Jonathan Lethem in 2018, “we are just barely beginning to catch up to what she has to offer.” In the years since, Rivera Garza’s work has received widespread recognition: she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant for fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Yet we have still only started to discover the full range of a writer who is at once an incisive voice on migration, borders, and violence against women, as well as a high stylist in the manner of Lispector or Duras.

Midnight, June 13, 1942: Peter Burger stands on a foggy beach, ears primed as a submarine hull scrapes the sandy sea bottom. He has endured seventeen months in a Gestapo prison and seventeen days on a Nazi U-boat only to have landed on American shores with six boxes of explosives and no escape. After slipping into New York City, Peter finds himself at a massive military parade where he meets Grete Baum, a German-Jewish refugee grappling with loneliness and loss. Grete is drawn to Peter’s brooding vulnerability, and the pair instantly bond.

Lotte Reiniger (1899-1981) was a German film director and animator best known for The Adventures of Prince Achmed, which was released in 1926 and is the oldest surviving animated movie. (It came out a full 11 years before Disney’s Snow White!) As a little kid, Reiniger loved reading fairy tales and fell in love with puppetry. At school, she learned about paperschnitte, or papercuts, which helped her create her signature style of silhouettes. She grew up to make more than 40 films throughout her long career.

Why has music so often served as an accomplice to transcendent expressions of gender? Why did the query "is he musical?" become code, in the 20th century, for "is he gay?" Why is music so inherently queer? For Sasha Geffen, the answers lie, in part, in music’s intrinsic quality of subliminal expression, which, through paradox and contradiction, allows rigid gender roles to fall away in a sensual and ambiguous exchange between performer and listener. Glitter Up the Dark traces the history of this gender fluidity in pop music from the early 20th century to the present day.

Lash by bloody lash, the she-devil from Dallas would get her revenge.

Award-winning journalist Caitlin Bergman's mother is dead - at least that's what she’s told everyone for the past 40 years. It’s easier to lie than to explain how Maya abandoned her only daughter before dropping off the map forever. But when a rural sheriff invites Caitlin to the woods of coastal Oregon to identify her mother's remains, Caitlin drops everything to face the woman she's spent a lifetime hating. Unfortunately, the body - abandoned on the land of a reclusive cult, the Daughters of God - was left faceless.

Fifteen years ago, Hector Lewis’ wife and young daughter vanished without a trace. People have long thought he was responsible, but the man he knows is behind their disappearance still walks free. As a police officer, he is sworn to uphold the law. But he has seen how little justice there is in the world. And when a newcomer’s arrival sparks a harrowing series of crimes, Hector finds himself in a race to catch a man he is convinced is a killer.

Taken from her home world of Mikuhr at a young age, Wind Haworth was raised by the conquering Sentinels. Although her loyalties are torn, she is determined to bridge the gap between the two cultures and their opposing ideologies, even if she must stand alone. Conflict explodes when apprentice priest Kiel Caldwell arrives on Mikuhr to explore rumors of new spiritual revelation, but he is kidnapped by a demon-possessed telepath who thinks Kiel might be a predicted messiah.

Lady Firebird Angelo Caldwell has been sentenced to death "in absentia" for treason, sedition, and heresy. The last thing she expects is a summons to return home and be confirmed as an heiress of her royal house. But merciless foes are destroying entire cities of the Federate worlds. These renegades are trying to wipe out the messianic Caldwell bloodline, and they have almost eradicated the royal Angelos.

In the 1990s, Megan Margulies' Upper West Side neighborhood was marked by addicts shooting up in subway stations, frequent burglaries, and the "Wild Man of 96th Street", who set fires under cars and heaved rocks through stained glass church windows. The world inside her parents' tiny one-bedroom apartment was hardly a respite, with a family of five - including some loud personalities - eventually occupying the 550-square-foot space.

A missile is fired from earth to hit the surface of the moon. It is successful, and the missilemen are heroes, until...THE MOON FIRES BACK! Terrible lunar missiles blast New York, London, and Paris. An ultimatum is delivered from the unsuspected civilization of our satellite: "You have attacked us! You will pay the penalty!"

Three years have passed since the devastation of Golyna. Anna, once the maker of immortals, continues to fight the evil she unwillingly created through her rune-carving magic. Secreted away in an isolated mountain monastery, she works as a teacher to young scribes, guiding them toward runes that foster peace rather than endless war. So when the tracker who murdered her brother comes to Anna’s redoubt, begging for his eternal runes to be undone, Anna agrees to grant his wish on one condition - that he aid her in rooting out the remnants of Volna, a genocidal regime....

1954: In South East Asia, Cade Martin, hero of the Midnight Front during World War II, chases ghosts and flees his past. In the United States, Briet Segfrunsdóttir heads the Pentagon’s top-secret magickal warfare program. And in South America, Anja Kernova hunts fugitive Nazi sorcerers with the help of a powerful magickal tome known as the Iron Codex. In an ever-more dangerous world, a chance encounter sparks an international race to find Anja and steal the Iron Codex.

Over a millennium in the past, humans fleeing Earth in slower-than-light vessels discovered the Waywork, an abandoned alien superhighway system that allows instantaneous travel from star to star. The problem: there are a finite number of Waypoint nodes - and the burgeoning population of humans is hemmed in as a result. Furthermore, humanity is divided into contending Starstates. One of the strongest is based on an oligarchy ruling families, but still mostly democratic. The other is a totalitarian nightmare. War seems inevitable.

Three long years have passed since Anna, First of Tomas, survived the purge in Malijad after being forced to use her scribe sigils to create an army of immortals. Safely ensconced in the shelter of the Nest, a sanctuary woven by one of her young allies, Anna spends her days tutoring the gifted yet traumatized scribe, Ramyi, and coming to terms with her growing attachment to an expatriate soldier in her company. Away from her refuge, war drums continue to beat. Thwarted in her efforts to locate the elusive tracker and bring him to justice, Anna turns to the state of Nahora for help.

It's the summer of 2008. Chicago's Hyde Park senator is running for the White House, the city is vying to host the 2016 Summer Olympics, and "Poison", a lethal form of heroin, has killed more than 250 people, including dozens of suburban girls from prominent families. Natalie Delaney, a crime reporter from the Chicago Times, discovers that daughters of Democratic powerhouses are the real targets. Obsessed with finding who is behind the killings, Natalie becomes entangled in an underworld where drugs, cops, gangs, politics, and privilege collide.

With a particular focus on obsession and the abnormal, We So Seldom Look on Love explores life at its quirky extremes, pushing past limits of convention into lives that are fantastic and heartbreakingly real. Whether writing about the dilemma of a two-headed man who attempts to expunge his own pain or the shock of a woman who discovers she has married a transsexual, Gowdy convinces us with incisive detail, only to disarm us with black humor.