Showing results for "Eddie Lopez" in Literature & Fiction

Considered “perhaps the most important American play of this century” by The Daily Telegraph, the Tony Award-winning Best Play has arrived on Audible. Based on Howards End by E.M. Forster, The Inheritance takes place in New York City decades after the AIDS epidemic. Eric Glass is a political activist engaged to his writer boyfriend, Toby Darling. When two strangers enter their lives—an older man and a younger one—their futures suddenly become uncertain as they begin to chart divergent paths.

As Chinese and US spacecraft compete to be the first to land on Mars, a former astronaut, his cousin, and four teens from Florida decide to take matters into their own hands. If they can quickly build their own space-worthy ship using scrap metal, appliances, and power tools, they have a chance to come from behind - thanks to an inventive new power source that can propel them to the Red Planet within three days. No guts, no glory.

The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been called the García Marquez of his generation. The Savage Detectives is a hilarious and sexy, meandering and melancholy, companionable and complicated road trip through Mexico City, Barcelona, Israel, Liberia, and finally the desert of northern Mexico. It is the first of Bolaño's two giant works, with 2666, to be translated into English and is already being hailed as a masterpiece.

The fearless Alatriste is hired to infiltrate a convent and rescue a young girl forced to serve as a powerful priest’s concubine. The girl’s father is barred from legal recourse as the priest threatens to reveal that the man’s family is “not of pure blood” and is, in fact, of Jewish descent—which will all but destroy the family name. As Alatriste struggles to save the young hostage from being burned at the stake, he soon finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into a conspiracy that leads all the way to the heart of the Spanish Inquisition.

Fifteen-year-old Iñigo Balboa enlists to serve as his master’s aide, and narrates their further adventures of swordplay and skirmishes, mutiny and wartime honor, as Captain Alatriste rejoins his Cartagena regiment to take part in the battles and siege of Breda. In Spain, Alatriste’s nemesis, Luis de Alquézar, grows more powerful, as Iñigo’s mysterious friend Angélica hints at some plans upon his return. Once again the exploits of the seventeenth-century mercenary will thrill and delight the legions of listeners eager to cheer a hero for the ages.

Navy Lieutenant Podkayne, daughter of Ray Garcia-Strickland, is tired of her job as Martian consul in California - and Earth’s oppressive gravity. So she’s okay with getting called back to Mars, even if it’s because her great-grandmother is sick and being put into suspended animation. After a family reunion, Podkayne’s next port of call is Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, where she can finally realize her dream of being a singer. But just when her life seems to be improving for the better, disaster strikes and Podkayne is put into her own state of suspension.

It doesn’t matter that Ray Garcia-Strickland’s father was one of the first men on Mars. The now overdeveloped planet has lost its hip factor, its luxurious hotels - like the one Ray’s father manages - overrun with gravity-dependent tourists from Earth. Ray is over the Red Planet. Soon he gets his own chance at interplanetary adventure when an unknown object hits Earth and causes a massive tsunami. Ray heads back to Florida to help family and friends who’ve survived the devastation - and soon learns the so-called natural disaster could have unnatural consequences.

Seville, 1626. After serving with honor at the bloody siege of Breda, Captain Alatriste and his protégé, Iñigo Balboa, accept a risky job involving a dozen swordsmen and mercenaries at their command, a dazzling amount of contraband gold, and a heavily guarded Spanish galleon returning from the West Indies. The job offer comes from the king himself, for at stake is nothing less than the Spanish Crown and its dominion over the wealth of the Americas. But for Alatriste, a very personal surprise awaits him on that galleon.

In Jordan Castro’s inventive, funny, and surprisingly tender first novel, we follow a young man over the course of a single morning as he tries and fails to write an autobiographical novel, finding himself instead drawn into the infinite spaces of Twitter, quotidian rituals, and his own mind. The Novelist: A Novel pays tribute to Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine and Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters, but in the end is a wholly original novel about language and consciousness, the internet and social media, and addiction and recovery.

New Year’s Eve, 1975. Two hunted men leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the mythical, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. But, twenty years later, they are still on the run. The Savage Detectives is their remarkable journey through our darkening universe.

In the cosmopolitan world of 17th-century Madrid, Captain Alatriste and his protégé Íñigo are fish out of water. But the king is determined to keep Alatriste on retainer - regardless of whether his "employment" brings the captain uncomfortably close to old enemies. Alatriste begins an affair with the famous and beautiful actress, María Castro, but soon discovers that the cost of her favors may be more than he bargained for - especially when he and Íñigo become unwilling participants in a court conspiracy that could lead them both to the gallows.

Ramón López was born along the US–Mexico border but is determined to get out and embrace the American dream—and he’s not sure whether his complicated family is a help or a hindrance. As the son of immigrants, as Ramón grows, his admiration for his entrepreneurial father sours as he watches his dad’s dreams of success wither on the vine. Ramón’s mother is constantly preoccupied with his younger brother, who struggles with intellectual disabilities. And the outside world is rife with danger and temptations threatening to distract Ramón from his dreams of making it to New York.

With the same profound attention to detail that is a hallmark of his previous acclaimed works of fiction National Book Award winner Ha Jin gives us a collection of stories that delves into the experience of Chinese immigrants in America. Ha Jin depicts here the full spectrum of immigrant life and the daily struggles - some minute, some grand - faced by these men, women, and children.

The Living Infinite is based on the true story of the Spanish princess Eulalia, an outspoken firebrand at the Bourbon court during the troubled and decadent final years of her family's reign. After her cloistered childhood at the Spanish court, her youth spent in exile, and a loveless marriage, Eulalia gladly departs Europe for the New World. In the company of a small-town bookseller with a thirst for adventure, she travels by ship, first to a Cuba bubbling with revolutionary fervor then on to the 1893 Chicago World Fair.

Plenty of legends surround the infamous Boulder House in Whispering Bluffs, Wisconsin, but nobody takes them seriously. Certainly nobody believes that the original owner, Maxwell Cartwright Jr., cursed its construction - or that a murder of crows died upon its completion, their carcasses turning the land black. Five very different high school seniors on a field trip - Violet, Paul, Ashley, Dylan, and Gretchen - are separated from the group, and they discover that what lies within Boulder House is far more horrifying than any local folklore.

Not all the folks who roamed the Old West were cowhands, rustlers, or cardsharps. And they certainly weren't all heroes. Give-a-Damn Jones, a free-spirited itinerant typographer, hates his nickname almost as much as the rumors spread about him. He's a kind soul who keeps finding himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's what happened in Box Elder, a small Montana town. Tensions are running high, and anything -or anyone - could be the fuse to ignite them.

Exchanging Western values for far-off Thailand, Gunnar Ray plans to teach in the countryside and absorb the country's ancient wisdom. When monsoon rains flood the lands above his adopted village, catastrophe strikes. Gunnar's innocence is swept downstream along with hundreds of Thai lives. Spiritually adrift, he washes up in the offices of the Bangkok Times, a crusading reporter hell bent on derailing corrupt officials at war with the Thai environment. He is not alone.

In the middle of the XVI century, when he abandoned his town, the Exiled knew that the only thing he could aspire to was survival. He would not begin at zero but under zero. He was going to a strange country, up north, in search of a place where thinking or feeling was not punishable by death. In this journey towards life and freedom, the Exiled has to distinguish between two paths: one that leads to survival and the one that leads to death. It’s a vital choice, the same one that individuals, cultures, and nations must also make if they wish to advance and not become extinct.