Showing results by narrator "Stefan Rudnicki" in All Categories

He was just a freckle-faced, red-headed kid with green eyes and a strangely campelling stare when Mather Mastiff first saw him an the auctioneer's block. One hundred credits and he was hers. For years the old woman was his only family. She loved him, fed him, taught him everything she knew - even let him keep the deadly flying snake he called Pip.Then Mother Mastiff mysteriously disappeared and Flinx took Pip to tail her kidnappers.

Herman Melville’s tale of corporate discontent, Bartleby, the Scrivener, tells the story of a quiet, hardworking legal copyist who works in an office in the Wall Street area of New York City. The business where he works handles the official financial paperwork of wealthy men. One day, Bartleby’s employer requests he proofread one of the documents he has copied. Bartleby declines the assignment with the inscrutable “I would prefer not,” the first of what will become many refusals.

Fairytales are a universal part of childhood. No matter what time or what place you grew up, you have at one point or another heard that classic phrase “once upon a time.” They are usually the first stories we ever hear or read. These types of tales set us up to understand the art of stories and storytelling, and they are certainly worth revisiting. Here in The Blue Fairy Book, the first of Andrew Lang’s beloved collections of classic fairy stories, you will return to the tales you already know.

"The Lottery," one of the most terrifying stories of the twentieth century, created a sensation when it was first published in the New Yorker. "Powerful and haunting," and "nights of unrest" were typical reader responses. This collection, the only one to appear during Jackson's lifetime, unites "The Lottery" with 24 equally unusual stories. Together they demonstrate her remarkable range - from the hilarious to the truly horrible - and power as a storyteller.

Matt Helm has been assigned to impersonate a newlywed oilman, Horace Cody, who has been dabbling in arms dealing. Something tells Matt that the Mexican will not last long … and he is more right than he knows!

Perhaps it wasn't from our time, perhaps it wasn't even from our universe, but the arrival of the 300-kilometer long stone was the answer to humanity's desperate plea to end the threat of nuclear war. Inside the deep recesses of the stone lies Thistledown: the remnants of a human society, versed in English, Russian and Chinese. The artifacts of this familiar people foretell a great Death caused by the ravages of war, but the government and scientists are unable to decide how to use this knowledge.

Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude", an imaginary crime that defies definition.

Finding one's calling is not just about finding something we can do - it is about finding what we can't not do. "Let your life speak" is a time-honored Quaker admonition to live one's life as witness to the deepest truths one knows. But as Parker Palmer explains, those words can also mean "listen to your life, and let it tell you what your truth is."

Susie Bright, founder of Best American Erotica, presents a classic, taboo-breaking collection of men’s erotic fiction - featuring the most unrepentant gay literary heroes of our generation. Legendary writers like John Preston, Samuel Delany, Steven Saylor/Aaron Travis, Lars Eighner, Dennis Cooper - who can imagine men’s intimate and transgressive lives without them?

A Hidden Wholeness is a thoughtful and heartfelt examination of sources and consequences of the alienation we feel when our inner and outer lives become divorced from each other, when external forces pressure us to depart from our soul's true yearnings. The book lifts up the problem of the "divided life", diagnoses its sources, assesses its personal and social costs, and offers a model of community that will help people live with greater integrity and wholeness.

AD 262: The Roman Imperium is in turmoil after the struggle for the throne that brought Gallienus to power. Ephesus, the metropolis of the Eastern Empire, lies in ruins, shattered by a mighty earthquake. Its citizens live in fear as the mob overwhelms the city, baying for blood to avenge the gods who have punished them. Yet an even greater threat to the Empire advances from the north: the barbaric Goth tribes, determined to pillage the city. Only Ballista, Warrior of Rome, knows the ways of the barbarians, and only he can defeat them.

In this beautiful spiritual travelogue, New York Times best-selling author George Weigel leads listeners through the historic streets of Kraków, Poland, introducing one of the world's great cities through the life of one of the most influential Catholic leaders of all time.

Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there...the population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. And into this disaster zone comes a young man - a poet, a lover, and an adventurer - known only as the Kid.

For the first time, best-selling author and brain expert Dr. Daniel G. Amen offers insight on the unique characteristics and needs of the female brain and a practical, prescriptive program targeted specifically for women to help them thrive. In this breakthrough guide based on research from his clinical practice, Dr. Amen addresses the issues women ask about the most including fertility, pregnancy, menopause, weight, stress, anxiety, insomnia, and relationships.

He's been called "America's greatest living tailor" and "the most interesting man in the world." Now, for the first time, Holocaust survivor Martin Greenfield tells his whole, incredible life story. Taken from his Czechoslovakian home at age 15 and transported to the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz with his family, Greenfield came face-to-face with "Angel of Death" Dr. Joseph Mengele and was divided forever from his parents, sisters, and baby brother. In haunting, powerful prose, Greenfield remembers his desperation and fear as a teenager alone in the death camp.

In music, counterpoint is the art of writing melodies that play in conjunction with one another, according to a strict set of rules, in order to emphasize the melody by contrast. In debate, point/counterpoint is a means of persuasion in which the speaker begins by conceding to their opponent’s argument before refuting it wholeheartedly. Aldous Huxley follows these traditions in his masterpiece Point Counter Point. The polarity between passion and reason in the intellectual life of the 1920s is demonstrated both in form and in theme in Huxley’s ambitious satire.

The invention of numerals is perhaps the greatest abstraction the human mind has ever created. Virtually everything in our lives is digital, numerical, or quantified. The story of how and where we got these numerals, which we so depend on, has for thousands of years been shrouded in mystery. Finding Zero is an adventure-filled saga of Amir Aczel's lifelong obsession: to find the original sources of our numerals.

Renowned throughout the land of Ankhana as the Blade of Tyshalle, Caine has killed his share of monarchs and commoners, villains and heroes. He is relentless, unstoppable, simply the best there is at what he does. At home on Earth, Caine is Hari Michaelson, a superstar whose adventures in Ankhana command an audience of billions.

Prather, whose five million-selling Notes to Myself helped invent self-help, does it again with a completely revolutionary program based on the principal of "letting go." In The Little Book of Letting Go, Prather offers a simple, three-step process for shedding our prejudices, preconceptions, and pre-judgments, and facing each moment with freshness and excitement. In this accessible, friendly book he explains why it is essential that readers learn to let go.

In an isolated olive grove on the idyllic Aegean island of Tinos, revered by religious pilgrims around the world as the Lourdes of Greece, two bodies charred beyond recognition are discovered, chained together amid bits and pieces of an incinerated Greek flag. An enraged press screams for justice for the unknown victims, until the dead are identified as gypsies, after which the story simply fades away. When the government orders the investigation closed, Inspector Andreas Kaldis, feared head of Greece’s special crimes division, has other plans.