Showing results by narrator "Carol Monda" in All Categories

Margaret "Peggy" Thomas and her husband, James, lead a simple and peaceful life; she tends to the farm while he works as sheriff in the nearby town of Bleak Knob. Their evenings are spent doing the thing they love most - being together. One afternoon, after picking up fabric at the general store, Margaret watches helplessly as James is gunned down on the sidewalk in front of her. Days of mourning turn into weeks and then years, filled with little more than grief and alcohol.

Flame-haired Lissa Piner is a skilled glass blower whose delicate gift conceals a burning inner strength that can destroy as it can create. Commissioned to design chandeliers for a string of hotels, her remarkable skills have taken her to Italy. But Lissa's real mission there is a secret. For her entire life has been a lie, leading to a chance to avenge a terrible wrong. Enlisted as her bodyguard is Casmir Prakenskii, a trained assassin. In Lissa, he sees a kindred spirit - something unexpected and wicked, mysterious and sensual. But more than desire is about to bring them together.

From its launch in 1920 until its demise in 1951, the magazine Black Mask published pulp crime fiction. The first hard-boiled detective stories appeared on its pages. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner and John D. MacDonald got their start in Black Mask. The urban crime stories that appeared in Black Mask helped to shape American culture.

Cass Neary made her name in the 70s as a photographer embedded in the burgeoning punk movement in New York City. Her pictures earned her a brief moment of fame. Thirty years later she is adrift, on her way down, and almost out when an old acquaintance sends her on a mercy gig to interview a famously reclusive photographer who lives on an island in Maine. When she arrives Down East, Cass stumbles across a decades-old mystery that is still claiming victims, and she finds one final shot at redemption.

As the story opens, Cass arrives in London, where she's arranged to meet her long-lost lover, Quinn O'Boyle. When Quinn fails to show at their rendezvous point, Cass meets the eccentric couple Mallo and Morven Dunfries. When Mallo catches Cass rifling through his medicine cabinet in search of drugs, he threatens to turn her in to the authorities then puts her to work as a runner for his illegal goods. Cass makes a delivery to Poppy Teasel, a famous singer from long ago.

The first Olympic women's marathon and the battle for the right to run.

Was there any particular reason that, near the end of your lives, you suddenly stopped buying Bounty paper towels? So begins the first question from Bounty’s market research representative to Paul and Maggie. In this unique short story, a couple who died suddenly in their 50s recounts their use of Bounty paper towels and their sudden switch to a bargain brand near the end of their lives. What appears to be a run-of-the-mill spat between spouses at the Stop & Shop is revealed to be a defining moment of a marriage years in decline.

The next best thing to having a room key to the Chelsea Hotel during each of its famous - and infamous - decades The Chelsea Hotel, since its founding by a visionary French architect in 1884, has been an icon of American invention: a cultural dynamo and haven for the counterculture, all in one astonishing building. Sherill Tippins, author of the acclaimed February House, delivers a masterful and endlessly entertaining history of the Chelsea and of the successive generations of artists who have cohabited and created there.

In this candid memoir, Olivia Hussey tells her story - from being an "It Girl" in swinging '60s London and her enduring friendship with Romeo & Juliet costar Leonard Whiting, through three tumultuous marriages - including one with Dean Martin's son, Dino - motherhood, stage-four breast cancer, debilitating agoraphobia, bankruptcy, and ultimately, a journey of self-discovery in India that led her on a path to fulfillment. Featuring a foreword by her star-making director Franco Zeffirelli, Olivia Hussey's memoir shines with her luminous spirit and perseverance.

The Gift of Cancer: A Miraculous Journey to Healing speaks to anyone on a journey of wellbeing, whether suffering from a life-threatening disease or merely desiring to live a better, more fulfilling life. After Brenda's third cancer diagnosis and being told she had a year to live, she boldly stepped away from the accepted medical model, said "no" to chemotherapy, and chose alternative treatment.

Wrestling with fear doesn't have to be a negative experience. This book offers an approach to life that unlocks a new way of thinking and being in the world, one that leads directly through the center of the anxieties we seek to avoid. Written in the style of an owner's manual, a guide to being human, Burkett focuses on areas of pain and anxiety as they tend to manifest for modern people: feelings of unworthiness, and issues surrounding sex, money, failure, and even death.

Pulp fiction's legendary "Man of Bronze", Doc Savage, stars in one of his most engrossing adventures. In this novel we meet Doc Savage's greatest enemy, the diabolical John Sunlight. Sunlight has set out on an evil mission of revenge and has armed himself with incredible scientific inventions that he managed to steal from Doc Savage's own "Fortress of Solitude" in the arctic. Doc must race to stop Sunlight before Doc's own inventions are put to sinister use.

Now updated with groundbreaking research, this award-winning classic examines the construction of sexual identity in biology, society, and history.

Penny Harrigan is a low-level associate in a law firm with no love life. So it comes as a shock when she’s invited to dinner by C. Linus Maxwell, a mega-billionaire. After dinner, he whisks Penny off to a hotel suite in Paris where Penny discovers that she is a test subject for the development of new sex toys. So effective are these devices that women lock themselves in their room and stop coming out...

'Mistress' - it sounded so sordid, so impersonal, so far removed from the relationship Marley had with Chrysander Anetakis. Three months later Marley awakens in the hospital, with no memory of what happened before she got there. She can't remember her past, Chrysander...or the baby she carries. Even though he never speaks of love, surely his protectiveness and his desire for her prove how much she means to him. Until she remembers the truth....

Jonathan Shaw's Scab Vendor: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist is a surreal, multigenerational roller-coaster ride through the underbelly of modern culture, charting the course of a life measured by extremes and all the people, places, and events that shaped that life into a survivor's tale of epic proportions. In it, Shaw takes the listener deep, not only into the recesses of his extraordinary mind and adventures but also into the strange and magical process of memoir-writing itself.

When a huge alien spacecraft crashes on the island of Cuba, the world scrambles to investigate. Secretive organizations have waited for generations for this opportunity, and they do not hesitate to send in recovery teams. Cooperation between nations breaks down as every government wants the newly discovered technology for themselves. Naturally, the Cubans have beaten everyone else, and the island is beginning to change. Aircraft flying reconnaissance are swatted from the skies.

From its launch in 1920 until its demise in 1951, the magazine Black Mask published pulp crime fiction. The first hard-boiled detective stories appeared on its pages. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner and John D. MacDonald got their start in Black Mask. The urban crime stories that appeared in Black Mask helped to shape American culture. Modern computer games, films, and television are rooted in the fiction popularized by the magazine.

Inflation: What It Is, Why It’s Bad, and How to Fix It explains what’s behind the worst inflationary storm in more than forty years—one that is dominating the headlines and shaking Americans by their pocketbooks. The cost-of-living explosion since the COVID pandemic has raised alarms about a possible return of a 1970’s-style “Great Inflation.” Some observers even fear a descent into the kind of Weimar-style hyperinflation that has torn apart so many nations. Is this true? If so, what should be done? How should we prepare for the future?

When Gustavo Dudamel, at the age of 28, ascended the podium at the Hollywood Bowl for his inaugural concert as conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he immediately captivated the hearts of his audience, just as he had the minds of music critics who designated him a modern-day Leonard Bernstein. In Changing Lives, the maestro's story becomes the entry point to an equally captivating subject: El Sistema, the music education program that nurtured his musical talent, first as a young violinist and then as a budding conductor under the mentorship of its founder, Jos Antonio Abreu.