Showing results by narrator "Natasha Soudek" in All Categories

Three neighboring villages on the Ukrainian/Romanian border are the final refuge for the last of the mythical creatures of Eastern Europe. Now, on the eve of the war that may eradicate their kind - and with the ruthless Night Police descending upon their sanctuary - they tell their stories and confront their destinies.

The great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser lived eccentrically on the fringes of society, shocking his Berlin friends by enrolling in butler school and later developing an urban-nomad lifestyle in the Swiss capital, Bern, before checking himself into a psychiatric clinic.

Celebrated transsexual trailblazer Kate Bornstein has, with more humor and spunk than any other, ushered us into a world of limitless possibility through a daring re-envisionment of the gender system as we know it. Here, Bornstein bravely and wittily shares personal and unorthodox methods of survival in an often cruel world. A one-of-a-kind guide to staying alive outside the box, Hello, Cruel World is a much-needed unconventional approach to life for those who want to stay on the edge, but alive.

They were sent to investigate the first extraterrestrial signal. What they found was beyond anything they could have imagined - or feared. On a voyage to a mysterious moon in the Alpha Centauri system, the UEA Centaurus meets with disaster. Only the quick thinking of the flight engineer, Rachel Terman, saves some of the crew. Crash-landing on the moon, trillions of kilometers from Earth, they struggle to carry out their mission and try to survive. But nothing has prepared them for what they will face.

In Oregon's timber country, inside a smoky bar, stands proprietor Tory Duncan. Once a hair's breadth from the Miss America crown, she's still just as beautiful and still searching for happiness. Joe Brigham, a forthright and handsome man from a logging family, divorced, and father of one, regards her with a love deep and pure. But trading in her search for an uncertain future, no matter the joy Joe promises to provide, seems more than Tory can afford.

Salma Lowe, progeny of Hollywood royalty and a once-promising child actor, now spends her days as a guide for the Stars Six Feet Under tour, leading tourists through Los Angeles’s star-studded avenues to haunting sites where actresses of the past met untimely ends. Salma knows better than anyone that a tragic death is the surest path to stardom.

Home-decorating expert Melissa Michaels invites you to experience the peace and joy that come from a well-balanced life that nurtures your home and soul throughout the year.

After a devastating galactic war, disgraced veteran Ralston Muck ekes out a living as a bouncer at Last Stop Station’s premier nightclub, A Curtain of Stars. Night after night he listens to the club’s star performer, Siren, sing her memories and ease some of his aching loss. But when Siren goes missing, Muck finds himself drawn into a world of dirty cops, drug lords, and conspiracies that trace back to the war itself.

A one-night stand with a handsome stranger wasn't a problem - until he tries to steal her company. Ambitious, high-powered CEO Lauren Bradley is one press release away from catapulting her company to new heights. Rival CEO Antonio Forte is arrogant, controlling, and sexy. She should know, since Antonio's a one-night stand she thought she'd never see again. Antonio wants to take over more than her company, he wants her as part of the acquisition. Let the games begin....

Gina Torrio is trying to break her addiction to bad boys with wounded spirits and dysfunctional pasts. Micah Wyatt is a flirt and a player, a little naughty but with no real harm in him. Gina thinks they might have a simple, no-strings fling without endangering her heart. But as animal attraction and flirtatious friendship blossom into sincere affection, neither Gina nor Micah knows how to deal with the depth of feeling growing between them.

There's a war in Europe. Everyone in the Three Societies must choose sides. I know whoses side I'm on. My own. Joining forces with the Guardians might be a huge mistake. But I'll do anything to find the last three rubies . . . And destroy them. The moment my plane touches down in Vienna, I'm in for a world of trouble. The Three Societies are divided into two factions, and you must choose a side. Just when I finally find love, my boyfriend and I are separated by our affiliations. And my ex keeps hanging around like there's something still between us.

In a world beset by amassing forces of darkness, one organization - the Regional Office - and its coterie of superpowered female assassins protects the globe from annihilation. At its helm, the mysterious Oyemi and her oracles seek out new recruits and root out evil plots. Then a prophecy suggests that someone from inside might bring about its downfall. And now the Regional Office is under attack.

In small-town Michigan, Abby Graven leads a solitary life. Once a bright student on the cusp of a promising art career, she now languishes in her childhood home, trudging to and from her job as a supermarket cashier. Each day she is taunted from the magazine racks by the success of her former best friend, Elise, a rising Hollywood starlet whose life in pictures Abby obsessively scrapbooks. When Abby encounters Elise again at their high school reunion, Elise’s unexpected faith in Abby reignites in her a dormant hunger.

After the death of her fiancé, Catherine Johnson, a New York schoolteacher in 1902, travels to Nebraska to teach in a one-room school. When violence erupts in the sleepy town, Catherine saves deaf stable hand Jim Kinney from torture by drunken thugs. As she begins teaching Jim to read and sign, attraction grows between them. The warmth and humor in this silent man transcends the need for speech, and his eyes tell her all about his feelings for her. But the obstacles of class difference and the stigma of his handicap are almost insurmountable.

For more than four decades, between 1969 and 2010, the remote former mining town of Trinidad, Colorado, was the unlikely crossroads for approximately 6,000 medical pilgrims who came looking for relief from the pain of gender dysphoria. The surgical skill and nonjudgmental compassion of surgeons Stanley Biber and his transgender protege Marci Bowers made the phrase "going to Trinidad" a euphemism for gender confirmation surgery in the worldwide transgender community.

1904, Chudniv, Ukraine. Playing hide-and-seek in bucolic fields of sunflowers, young Jakob never imagines the horrific secrets he will carry as he and his brother escape through genocide-ridden Eastern Europe. 1994, South Haven, Michigan. At age 94, time is running out for any hope that Jakob can be free from his burden of guilt. When Jakob’s wife dies, he and his daughter, Nel, are forced to face the realities of his worsening dementia. The God they have both been running from shows that he redeems not only broken years, but also the future.

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.

Berlin does not make it easy to write noir fiction - or perhaps Berlin makes it too easy. Noir tradition casts a long, influential, and even daunting shadow. Neither Döblin nor Benn, Brecht nor Lang, catered to any crime fiction traditions. They merely steeped their literary projects in a great deal of noir. And so it is with most of the stories in our anthology: they do not necessarily follow the usual patterns of crime fiction, but regard noir as a license to write as they wish, a certain way of approaching the city, and a prism through which its nature is viewed....

Leah Schaeffer has come a long way since an accident took her sight. She's finally ready for independence, but convincing her wealthy parents she'll be safe on her own isn't easy. The first night in her own place at last, she encounters her neighbor with the midnight velvet voice and her world shifts again. Since finishing a military tour, J.D. Wyatt has struggled both financially and emotionally. When Leah's parents hire him to act as her bodyguard, he seizes the opportunity.

This anthology, with an introduction by Robert Silverberg, offers a sweeping survey of robots as depicted throughout literature. Since the Iliad—in which we are shown golden statues built by Hephaestus “with minds and wisdoms”—humans have been fascinated by the idea of artificial life. From the Argonautica to the medieval Jewish legend of the Golem and Ambrose Bierce’s tale of a chess-playing robot, the idea of what robots are—and who creates them—can be drastically different.