Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Anthologies & Short Stories

From award-winning author James M. Tabor come these two dark tales about the power of loss and the cost of greed. In "Antiques", a father haunted by guilt over his son's suicide is drawn toward another world.

Ed and Kim experience unexpected consequences when they try to reunite their adopted daughter with her Native American heritage. The couple decides to take turns splitting their time between their Seattle condo and the second home they've built on the Montana prairie so Kaitlyn can get to know her birthplace.

"Spore" follows hard-working Rosália, a manicurist who has built herself a solid reputation and is trusted by her wealthy clients; that is, until she unexpectedly discovers her own dark side. Now she will have to go to great lengths to hide her twisted urges.

At once surreal and grounded in stark reality, these stories offer poignant, touching, and at times shocking insight into the lives and minds of women in modern Brazil. Varied in detail, each tale explores a woman's sense of identity and place, within Brazilian society and at vulnerable moments within her most intimate relationships. Diving deep to the raw psychological core of her protagonists, Leite shatters the traditional rules for both women and literature, producing a powerful voice of female rebellion.

After the violent, shadowy events surrounding his father's disappearance and his siblings' disbandment, Martín flees Mexico City with his wife, newborn son, and dog. Isolated and homesick in Madrid, Martín awakes one sticky, hot morning, quietly overwhelmed by the circumstances - his growing aversion to his son, the dog's sudden illness, and the vague unresolved danger from his abandoned homeland.

For twenty-two-year-old Julia, just out of college, Vancouver has become a social wasteland. Her boyfriend has gone off to London to study art history, leaving her feeling abandoned in the not-quite-derelict historic apartment where she is alone - surrounded by people. While working a series of odd jobs, Julia inadvertently befriends Oliver, one of her aloof neighbors.

If only reality could resemble the fantasy of what pregnancy is supposed to be like - the brimming excitement, the feelings of significance, a healthy glow. But for Jenny, a young mother-to-be recently relocated from NYC to the suburbs, pregnancy hasn't done a thing to cure her incessant self-doubt and loneliness.

In a tripping and absorbing style, award-winning Brazilian writer Claudia Lage asks listeners to gaze into the dark side of love and desire, and ultimately even to sympathize with her flawed hero and heroine. A Little Death is both an unconventional love story and a raw, visceral tale that explores the journey to adulthood in all its complexity and hilarity.

When Beatriz, lonely and desperate for money, places an ad as a writing consultant in the local paper, her first client is Dolores Maria Rubia de Alicanto, an imposing old widow who has hired her to transcribe the story of her life. Beatriz is taken aback when the woman starts with the words "My husband betrayed me..." and proceeds to relay a gripping story of deception, crumbled desire, and vengeance.

In these two short thrillers, best-selling author L.J. Sellers explores how the dark side of human nature takes over in crucial, fearful moments and leads to irreversible, life-changing repercussions.

Nothing is what it used to be for our salesman narrator: not his family, not his commissions, not even the commuter jets that carry him from client to client. Having lost his top-of-the-heap status in his profession, he reflects on his new reality with a darkly comic perspective that resonates deeply with each of us who has desperately needed a new direction in life.

The detective is losing his mind. Suffering from a panic disorder that has him haunting emergency rooms in rising waves of crisis, the detective begins to lose his grip - on his relationship with his fiery young lover, on his ability to work, on his health.

The two scientists meet when a lab rat escapes from its cage after giving birth. When they find the rat, they also discover one tiny, raw-pink baby, mewling despairingly at a frequency inaudible to human ears. From there, love - or some disjointed, broken version of it - develops between the scientists.

His father bent on making him a true Spanish nobleman, romantic young Eduardo crosses the seas to join his bumbling, megalomaniacal uncle, Cortés. Once he arrives in the new world, Eduardo falls passionately in love with an Aztec princess yet still assumes his place as a reluctant conquistador.

John, a widower and retired judge, has had a hard time letting go of the things that remind him of his beloved deceased wife, Millie: most of all their cherished robotic (but stunningly lifelike) spaniel, Sheila, who has been his stalwart companion for twenty-five years.

Pat, a Vietnam vet finished with marriage and booze, gets his dose of society sitting alone and dry at the local bar. One afternoon, watching a pre-season Red Sox game, he ends up next to a group of loudmouth writers gathered around a man in a wheelchair. The writers get under Pat's skin, and he says something lousy to the big-shot who, it turns out, is also a big-shot writer.

Thirty years hasn't changed Las Vegas - the desert just got dirtier. The biggest game in town centers on a massive, deadly roller coaster that winds its way through the Strip's most famous attractions. On the first Saturday of every month, twenty-four desperate passengers get strapped into the notorious ride and gamble with their lives in a twisted game of chance, to the thrill of webcast audiences worldwide. One of them will win, and one will die, but the other twenty-two will escape with nothing but their lives.

Every year, on the same night in November, a bouquet of flowers, a vintage bottle of wine, and a handwritten note appear next to a small wooden cross on the side of a lonely country highway. Year after year, it's the same offering at the same time. On his way home from work at the factory, Tom notices these roadside tributes and wonders who the mysterious mourner might be.

Anna Reuben intends to get out of Summer Breeze - the quaint seaside resort where she's just inherited a house - and back to the city as quickly as possible. The last thing she wants to do is stick around and dredge up old emotions about the mother who abandoned her as a child. But her plans are foiled by an encounter with Scott Murray, a sexy single dad and a neighbor and close friend of Anna's late mother.

Three years after a series of massive waves takes out New York City and apocalyptic weather continues to shrink US coastlines, Julian and Kate's daughter returns to their Midwestern home...what's left of it. They should be thrilled, but while Kate is happy to have her daughter home, Julian can't quite believe it's really her. Since their daughter worked in New York City at the time of the first disaster, it seems impossible for her to be alive.