Showing results by narrator "Edoardo Ballerini" in All Categories

New Pittsburgh, 1898 - a crucible of invention and intrigue. Born from the ashes of devastating fire, flood, and earthquake, the city is ruled by the shadow government of The Oligarchy. Jake Desmet and Rick Brand travel the world to secure treasures and unusual items for the collections of wealthy patrons, accompanied by Jake's cousin, Veronique Le Clerque. But when their latest commission leads to Jake's father's murder, the three friends are drawn into a conspiracy where dark magic, industrial sabotage, and monsters that prey on the night will ultimately threaten not just New Pittsburgh, but the whole world.

In five elegant autobiographical meditations Calvino delves into his past, remembering awkward childhood walks with his father, a lifelong obsession with the cinema, and fighting in the Italian Resistance against the Fascists. He also muses on the social contracts, language, and sensations associated with emptying the kitchen rubbish and the shape he would, if asked, consider the world. These reflections on the nature of memory itself are engaging, witty, and lit through with Calvino's alchemical brilliance.

To Billy Harney, the newest member of Chicago PD's elite strike force, getting shot in the head, stalked by a state's attorney, and accused of murder by his fellow cops is all part of breaking a case. So, when a drive-by shooting on the Chicago's West Side turns political, he doesn't shy away from leading the case. As the easy answers prove to be the wrong ones, Harney's quest to expose the evil that's rotting the city from the inside out takes him to the one place he vowed never to return: his own troubled past.

In 2024, award-winning reporters Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf bring us the definitive and explosive account of how Trump and his advisers overcame a dozen primary challengers, four indictments, two assassination attempts, and his own past mistakes to defeat the Democrats, and pave the way for a second term that would be far more aggressive and ruthless than the first.

It is 1940. For the past decade, Walter Benjamin - the German-Jewish critic and philosopher - has been writing his masterpiece in a library in Paris, a city he loves. Now Nazi tanks have overrun the suburbs, and Benjamin is forced to flee. With a battered briefcase that contains his precious manuscript of a thousand handwritten pages, he sets off for the border and is led by chance to a young anti-Nazi who is taking Jews and other refugees over the Pyrenees into Spain, where they may (with luck) make their way to freedom in Portugal or South America.

Nicholas Fox Weber, in this deft, entertaining, and brilliant rumination on art and technology, writes of the iPhone as the essence of the Bauhaus principles of form following function - of honesty of design and materials that reflect the true nature of objects and buildings, favoring linear and geometrical forms; adhering to line, shape, and colors; synthesizing art to modern times; the fusion in design of art and technology.

For centuries, works of art have been stolen in countless ways from all over the world, but no one has been quite as successful at it as the master thief Stéphane Breitwieser. Carrying out more than 200 heists over nearly ten years - in museums and cathedrals all over Europe - Breitwieser, along with his girlfriend who worked as his lookout, stole more than 300 objects, until it all fell apart in spectacular fashion. In The Art Thief, Michael Finkel brings us into Breitwieser’s strange and fascinating world.

When Gus Dupin, literary critic and scholar, finds himself invited to the funeral of Peggy Firmin, celebrated novelist and now murder victim, he is determined to find out who killed her and why. As his investigation gets underway, it is not long before he finds himself at the center of an experiment at Marlow AI, a large language model company.

The stories in Paul Alan Ruben's Terms of Engagement explore father and son as intimate enemies, each yearning to be understood, acknowledged, and validated by the other. Raw and gripping as delivered by a cast of incredible narrators, these nine stories take place in collision territory - where father and son engage in trying to repair their alienation.

Continuing her tradition of writing provocative fiction about fascinating women, here Marie NDiaye gives us the story of a Great Female Chef - a chef who was celebrated as one of the best in a world where men dominate, and the way that her pursuit of love, pleasure, and gustatory delights helped shape her life and career. Told from the perspective of her former assistant (and unrequited lover), now an aged chef himself, here is the story of a woman's quest to the front of the kitchen - and the extraordinary journey she takes along the way.

Proud grandmother Matelda Cabrelli always has something to say. But, as she faces the end of her life, she worries she's failed to tell the stories that matter. Most of all, she finds herself needing to tell the tale of her mother Domenica's two great loves. First, Domenica's childhood sweetheart: a boy from her own small coastal town of Viareggio. Second, a mysterious captain: an infatuation forged in the midst of WW2, and the father Matelda never knew.

As America finds its footing in the post-World War II years, violence has decimated the Mafia’s leadership in the US and in Italy. Renegade gangsters are dispatching their own form of justice. Chaos rules the streets of New York. When the mob war spills over into Narrows Gate, a gritty New Jersey waterfront town, the young grocer Sal Benno and his lifelong friend Leo Bell must fight to hold their Polk Street community together.

Speed: the most demonized - and misunderstood - drug in the land. Deprived of the ingrained romantic mysticism of the opiate or the cosmopolitan chic of cocaine or the mundane tolerance of marijuana, there is no sympathy for this devil. Yet speed - crystal meth, amphetamines, Dexedrine, Benzedrine, Adderall; crank, spizz, chickenscratch, oblivious marching powder, the go-fast - is the most American of drugs: twice the productivity at half the cost, and equal opportunity for all.

This is what we long for: the profound pleasure of being swept into vivid new worlds, worlds peopled by characters so intriguing and real that we can't shake them, even long after the story's told. In this extraordinary audiobook, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, Dominic Smith brilliantly bridges the historical and the contemporary, tracking a collision course between a rare landscape by a female Dutch painter of the Golden Age, an inheritor of the work in 1950s Manhattan, and a celebrated Australian art historian who painted a forgery of it in her youth.

Paul Robert digs down to the economic roots of the problem, shows how it has metastisized to affect every facet of our lives and our ability to navigate the future. In clear, cogent prose that mixes illuminating analysis and vibrant reporting, Roberts not only tells the fascinating story of how the impulse society came to be, but shows how, perhaps, a healthier society may still be possible.

When two brilliant misfits bond at an elite Chicago private school—one a white legacy kid named Todd Keane and the other, Rafi Young, a Black scholarship student from the South Side—their friendship seems as boundary-breaking and limitless as the 3,000-year-old board game that brings them together. For a time, not even simultaneously falling in love with Ina Aroita, who grew up in naval bases across the Pacific, shakes them. Until finally it does, with a betrayal that launches all three of them on radically different paths.

Four thought-provoking masterworks for the theater by the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Stranger and The Plague, in a restorative new American translation by Ryan Bloom that brings together, for the first time in English, Camus's final versions of the plays, along with deleted scenes and alternate lines of dialogue.

In spring 2008, inspired by the Vietnam-era Winter Soldier hearings, Iraq Veterans Against the War gathered veterans to expose war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Here are the powerful words, images, and documents of this historic gathering, which show the reality of life in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Valerio and Olivia grow up together in the Morganti family’s opulent villa in Bologna, inseparable friends even though they come from vastly different worlds: Olivia, the Morgantis’ daughter, is the heir to a large industrial fortune, while Valerio is the son of their gardener and maid. Largely sheltered from the dangers rampant in the unstable Italy of the 1970s, the two share their first innocent kiss at five years old, which heralds the start of a decades-long relationship.

Cristian has lived his entire life in the grip of a repressive dictatorship. The country is governed by fear. When the secret police blackmail him, Cristian has an impossible choice. Save the life of his sick grandfather by informing on his family, or risk his life—and all of theirs—by resisting? At 17, Cristian dreams of being free but doesn't know where to turn. In this climate of constant suspicion, can he trust his best friend, his girlfriend or even his family?