Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in United States

¿Qué sucede cuando un hombre que lleva 30 años recordando su primer amor se reencuentra con la mujer que lleva 30 años intentando de olvidarlo? Desde las luchas sindicales de los años 80 en el puerto de Tampico a la violencia que aflige al pueblo mexicano en la actualidad, esta historia de equívocos, sospechas, secretos, asesinatos, amor y odio determinará las vidas de dos seres muy dispares a los que el destino se empeña en unir contra toda circunstancia

Revenge and murder define Ximena Godoy's story. Her lifetime spans the first half of the 20th century, a transformative time of revolution, economic depression, uprooting, and migration. During that time she witnesses and participates in an era of revolution, bootlegging, dance halls, as well as evolving rules that determine women's lives in both Mexico and America. Never a traditional or conventional woman, Ximena Godoy shatters rules that govern her Mexican heritage and even those of a wider world.

John Polly enters Shanghai in 1948 on a muggy, velvet evening, just in time for the Communist takeover of China. It marks only his fourth month in America's newly formed Central Intelligence Agency. Over the next two decades, Polly will become The White Mandarin, a double agent buried so deep within the inner circle of the People's Republic as to shape the futures of both that nation and his own.

In The Whole Five Feet, Christopher Beha turns to the great books for answers after undergoing a series of personal and family crises and learning that his grandmother had used the Harvard Classics to educate herself during the Great Depression. The result is a smart, big-hearted, and inspirational mix of memoir and intellectual excursion that "deftly illustrates how books can save one's life" (Helen Schulman).

Adam Lennard had never been a sleep-talker until, one night while fast asleep, he yelled, "Enough with the cheese! Enough!" From that night, Adam's exclamations grew exponentially in topic, crudeness, and downright hilarity, and his wife, Karen Slavick-Lennard, had the good sense to write it all down.

Temple Gordon is beautiful and proud, a Southern belle raised on her father's luxurious plantation. She is also a Cherokee. "The Blade" Stuart, an impulsive nearby landowner, is Cherokee as well. He and Temple share a passion for each other and a concern for their people. But while Temple wishes to protect the Cherokee way of life, The Blade seeks to save his people from death.

Every single morning since early 2007, Princeton English professor Jeff Nunokawa has posted a brief essay in the Notes section of his Facebook page. Often just a few sentences but never more than a few paragraphs, these compelling literary and personal meditations have raised the Facebook post to an art form, gained thousands of loyal readers, and been featured in the New Yorker.

In Strawberry Yellow, he returns to the strawberry farms of his youth and encounters family intrigue, danger, and murder. The series' most compelling and evocative mystery yet is set in the strawberry fields of Watsonville, California, where young Mas first arrived as a Hiroshima survivor in the 1940s. He returns for the funeral of a cousin and quickly gets entangled in the murder of a young woman. Was his cousin murdered, too?

Mas Arai's best friend, Haruo, is getting married, and he has grudgingly agreed to serve as best man. But when an ancient Japanese doll display of Haruo's fiance goes missing, the wedding is called off with fingers pointed at Haruo. To solve the mystery and to save Haruo's life, Mas must untangle a web of secrecy, heartbreaking memories, and murder.

Chinese Yankee by Ruthanne Lum McCunn tells the true story of Hong Kong born Thomas Sylvanus (Ah Yee Way), an orphan brought to America for schooling in the mid-1850s, but enslaved in Baltimore. Only sixteen at the outbreak of war, Thomas ran north, joined the Freedom Army, and was blinded in the first major campaign. He failed to fully recover his sight and, deemed incapable of performing the duties of a soldier, was discharged.

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.

Faithless is a work of experimental fiction weaving through various scenes and memories of being in love, out of love, and abused by love as told and experienced by Grace, a troubled 20-something-year-old struggling with her identity as a bisexual Korean-American. Everything is recounted as experienced - in fragments.

Jimmy Santiago Baca's brilliantly received memoir, A Place to Stand, earned him the prestigious International Prize and offered a keyhole view into the brutal personal history that shaped - and continues to inform - his raw, incisive voice. In C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans, he trains his hallmark lyrical intensity on the dark underbelly of addiction and takes us on an unforgettable guided tour of the darkest corners of a brutal, unjust world.

August 2, 1991, Twentynine Palms, California: a troubled Marine who has recently returned from the Gulf War savagely murders two young girls. One was about to turn 16, the other 21. Exquisitely and inexorably, Deanne Stillman uses this tragedy as a prism through which she examines a rootless culture of fatherless families, shattered dreams, and relentless violence. She also traces the family histories of each murder victim back for generations, in one case to the Donner Party and the other to a shack in the Philippines.

On July 26, 2003, the 50th anniversary of the Moncada Army Barracks raid in Santiago de Cuba, something unexpected happens. When Fidel Prez and his brother accidentally tumble to their deaths from their Havana balcony, the neighbors’ outcry, "Fidel has fallen," is misinterpreted by those who hear it. The misinformation quickly ripples outward, and it reawakens the city.

Letters of a Nation is a unique and timeless collection of extraordinary letters spanning more than 350 years of American history, from the arrival of the Pilgrims to the present day. Many of the more than 200 letters are published here for the first time, and the correspondents are the celebrated and obscure, the powerful and powerless, including presidents, slaves, soldiers, prisoners, explorers, writers, revolutionaries, Native Americans, artists, religious and civil rights leaders, and people from all walks of life.

A brilliant writer and a fiery social critic, Margaret Fuller (1810 - 1850) was perhaps the most famous American woman of her generation. Outspoken and quick-witted, idealistic and adventurous, she became the leading female figure in the transcendentalist movement, wrote a celebrated column of literary and social commentary for Horace Greeley's newspaper, and served as the first foreign correspondent for an American newspaper.

In this wide-ranging, brilliantly researched work, David S. Reynolds traces the factors that made Uncle Tom’s Cabin the most influential novel ever written by an American. Upon its 1852 publication, the novel’s vivid depiction of slavery polarized its American readership, ultimately widening the rift that led to the Civil War. Reynolds also charts the novel’s afterlife - including its adaptation into plays, films, and consumer goods - revealing its lasting impact on American entertainment, advertising, and race relations.

Herman Melville's epic tale of obsession has all the ingredients of a first rate drama - fascinating characters in solitude and society, battles between good and evil, a thrilling chase to the death - and yet its allusions, digressions, and sheer scope can prove daunting to even the most intrepid listener. George Cotkin's Dive Deeper provides both a guide to the novel and a record of its dazzling cultural train. It supplies easy-to-follow plot points for each of the novel's 135 sections before taking up a salient phrase, image, or idea in each for further exploration.

Quiet As They Come is a beautiful and at times brutal portrait of a people caught between two cultures. Set in San Francisco from the 1980s to the present day, this debut collection explores the lives of several families of Vietnamese immigrants as they struggle to adjust to life in their new country, often haunted by the memories and customs of their old lives in Vietnam. While some are able to survive and assimilate, others are crushed by the promise of the "American Dream."