Showing results by author "James De Leo" in All Categories

The Ultimate Classics Collection: Volume One is a continent-hopping, century-spanning collection of 15 essential classic novels by British, American, and Russian authors, read by a cast of incredible narrators including Stephen Fry, Jason Isaacs, Adjoa Andoh, David Rintoul, and many more.

These novelists burst with a literary energy that is hard to contain. They cover a myriad of styles and themes, narratives packed full of fully-formed characters in powerful tales that have become an essential and integral part of our literary heritage.

Midnight Cowboy is considered by many to be one of the best American novels published since World War II. The main story centers around Joe Buck, a naive but eager and ambitious young Texan, who decides to leave his dead-end job in search of a grand and glamorous life he believes he will find in New York City. But the city turns out to be a much more difficult place to negotiate than Joe could ever have imagined. He soon finds himself and his dreams compromised. Buck's fall from innocence and his relationship with the crippled street hustler Ratso Rizzo form the novel's emotional nucleus.

Murder comes in two familiar forms. Whether as a crime of passion with high emotions or a cold dispassionate plot to take life in order to gain in some way, the act strikes us all as somehow inhuman. Beneath us as civilised beings. But however we cloak our animal instincts the need to remove a human being and gain relief from abuse or gain from money, the term is just the same – MURDER. Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, J M Barrie, W W Jacobs and many others bring their literary heft to bear in as calculating a way as any killer could.

Backyard Battlefields is a history podcast which explores historical sites throughout Australia and beyond. Presented by James De Leo

A selection of stories to entertain for when you have a spare 10 minutes, including "After the Race", by James Joyce; "Three Questions", by Leo Tolstoy; "The Child's Story", by Charles Dickens; and "A Transgression", by Anton Chekhov, read by Sir Michael Redgrave.

Sadness can be about so many things from places to people, from thoughts to actions. Our classic authors including Arnold Bennett, James Joyce, Willa Cather, Joseph Conrad, Ivan Turgenev and many others use their pens and stories to demonstrate the many ways this feeling can take a hold of lives and its consequences.

Layers of Deception is a fast-paced international crime thriller filled with twists, turns, and intrigue exposing conflicts between brothers, religion, gender, love, risk, and greed. Set in Malaysia and the UK, software business entrepreneur Steve Roussos struggles to safeguard his colleagues and family when evidence comes to light that exposes criminal activities on the dark net. The thriller draws on the author’s many years experience of doing business in Asia.

It’s the fall of 1969, and Gloria Random’s best friend John has been called up for the draft. To escape it, they decide to run away from their Midwest town and their mundane lives. Renaming themselves Witch and Roy, they head to New York City in search of Witch’s biological father. Landing in the East Village, they are pulled into a community of drug use, mystical rituals, and sexual experimentation as they try to hide deeper and deeper from the realities they left behind. James Leo Herlihy’s third novel captures the mood and grooves of late-60s New York at the height of the anti-war movement and the counterculture revolution.

In his second collection of short stories, James Leo Herlihy explores a landscape of people living on the fringes of normal society as the pleasures of daily life fade. Men and women search for the missing fragment of meaning from their existence with Herlihy’s signature humor and deft dialogue. In the titular story, Mary Ellen McClure is trapped in a dull, unfulfilled life in a trailer park, suspecting her husband of having an affair. Together with her neighbor Ivy, she dabbles with a Ouija board which spells out the name Ezra and implies that Mary Ellen will have an affair.

Most people in town think 16-year-old Clinton Williams’ family is strange. Wishing he could contact his wayward brother, Clinton yearns for a day when he, too, can escape the neighborhood and travel the country. After following a clue to Berry-berry’s whereabouts, Clinton ventures to Coastal Florida hoping to find him, but instead gets a firsthand view of his brother’s callous destructiveness that will leave permanent marks on the young man.

From James Leo Herlihy (author of Midnight Cowboy) comes a series of grim yet insightful short stories in his first collection, The Sleep of Baby Filbertson. Both an examination of the darker themes of alienation and isolation and an elevation of the oddities and quirks that make up human nature, Herlihy’s seven tales tackle the anxieties of fragile people and get to the heart of a world inhabited by perennial outsiders.

Two dudes, random subjects and talking smack. Listen if you want, don't if you don't. We're experts on nothing and fully expect this to be a car crash of a podcast.Questions, views and opinions are our own. If you're on the woke train or a preacher of veganism this probably isn't for you.Email: smacktalkcity@outlook.com