Showing results by publisher "Hachette Audio" in Anthologies

Where do you begin with a writer as original and brilliant as David Foster Wallace? Here - with a carefully considered selection of his extraordinary body of work, chosen by a range of great writers, critics, and those who worked with him most closely. This volume presents his most dazzling, funniest, and most heartbreaking work.

Coming of age, the impact of class, and familial and romantic love are the prevalent motifs, along with the instinct toward escape and subsequent nostalgia for home. Some of the stories are linked, and some carry O'Brien's distinct sense of the comical. In "A Rose in the Heart of New York", the single-mindedness of love dramatically derails the relationship between a girl and her mother while in "Sister Imelda" and "The Creature", the strong ties between teacher and student and mother and son are ultimately broken.

Examining the borders between one nation and another, between one person and another, Urrea reveals his mastery of the short form. This collection includes the Edgar-award winning "Amapola" and his now-classic "Bid Farewell to Her Many Horses," which had the honor of being chosen for NPR's "Selected Shorts" not once but twice.

In these 12 electrifying tales Jeffery Deaver proves once again his genius for the unexpected - in his world, appearances are always deceiving. A devoted housekeeper embarks on a quest to find the truth behind her employer's murder. A washed-up Hollywood actor gets one last, high-stakes chance to revive his career. A man makes an impulsive visit to his hometown, and learns more about his past than he bargained for. Two Olympic track hopefuls receive terrorist threats. And Deaver's beloved series characters Lincoln Rhyme, Kathryn Dance, and John Pellam return.

"The Book Case" is a story that features Nelson DeMille's most famous (and successful) character, Detective John Corey, who has appeared in six DeMille novels: Plum Island, The Lion's Game, Night Fall, Wild Fire, and The Lion. In this story, we see John Corey in his early years as an NYPD Detective, before he became involved with the Federal Anti-Terrorist Task Force.

The machines started popping up around the world. The offer was tempting: with a simple blood test, anyone could know how they would die. But the machines didn't give dates or specific circumstances - just a single word or phrase. DROWNED, CANCER, OLD AGE, CHOKED ON A HANDFUL OF POPCORN. And though the predictions were always accurate, they were also often frustratingly vague.

Breece D'J Pancake cut short a promising career when he took his own life at the age 26. Published posthumously, this is a collection of stories that depict the world of Pancake's native rural West Virginia.

Two women have gone missing, and LAPD detective Harry Bosch has a strong suspicion that an avid fisherman named Denninger is the culprit. Bosch needs something stronger than a suspicion to bring Denninger in, but all he has are a handful of photos - prior mug shots and pictures of Denninger posing with his prize fish. It's not much to go on, and Bosch is running out of time, which is why he calls in FBI agent Rachel Walling. What she sees in these photos could blow his case wide open.

Uwem Akpan's stunning stories humanize the perils of poverty and violence so piercingly that few listeners will feel they've ever encountered Africa so immediately. The eight-year-old narrator of "An Ex-Mas Feast" needs only enough money to buy books and pay fees in order to attend school. Even when his twelve-year-old sister takes to the streets to raise these meager funds, his dream can't be granted. Food comes first. His family lives in a street shanty in Nairobi, Kenya, but their way of both loving and taking advantage of each other strikes a universal chord.

From "one of the funniest writers in America" comes a collection of stories culled from the front lines of the millennial culture wars. Rife with failing rock bands, student loans, and participation trophies,

Spoiled Brats is about a generation of narcissists - and the well-meaning boomers who made them that way.

These stories reveal men and women living with passion and tenderness at the outer limits of the senses, each attempting to triumph against fate. Bass provides searing insights into the complexity of family and romantic entanglements, and his lush and striking language draws us ineluctably into the lives of these engaging people and their vivid surroundings.

In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness--a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity.

LAPD Detective Harry Bosch tackles three tough cases that span a legendary career in this never-before-collected trio of stories. Utterly unputdownable, they are proof that "Connelly never stops doling out the suspense.... Once it grabs you in those first few pages, it won't let go of you" ( Boston Globe).

Here is LAPD Detective Harry Bosch as we've never seen him before, in three never-before-collected stories. In "Suicide Run", the apparent suicide of a beautiful young starlet turns out to be much more sinister than it seems. In "Cielo Azul", Bosch is haunted by a long-ago closed case: the murder of a teenage girl who was never identified. In "One Dollar Jackpot", Bosch works the murder of a professional poker player whose skills have made her more than one enemy.

A book of brilliant entertainments: 39 stories spanning the entire career of a great modern writer and an undisputed comic genius, "a satirist whose skill at sticking pens in people rates him a roomy cell in the murderers' row (Swift, Poe, Wilde, Shaw) of English letters" ( Time).

Clendenin Hughes first kissed Dabney Kimball during a Nantucket snowstorm freshman year of high school. Ever since that moment - God, the rush, the chemistry! - Dabney has known that she and Clen are an unsplittable unit - essentially the same person in two different bodies. Of course, with Dabney now at Harvard and Clen at Yale, those bodies are 140 miles apart. A stirring portrait of young love at a crossroads, The Tailgate introduces two irresistible characters and invites us into a world we don't want to leave.

From the eerily "real", almost holographic evocations of historical figures like Lyndon Johnson and over-televised game-show hosts and late-night comedians to the title story, in which terminal punk nihilism meets Young Republicanism, David Foster Wallace renders the incredible comprehensible, the bizarre normal, the absurd hilarious, and the familiar strange.

In this singular and imaginative story collection, Cecelia Ahern explores the endless ways in which women blaze through adversity with wit, resourcefulness, and compassion. Ahern takes the familiar aspects of women's lives—the routines, the embarrassments, the desires—and elevates these moments to the outlandish and hilarious with her astute blend of magical realism and social insight.

Frank Becker is a highly sought after, expert assassin. When Becker takes a mysterious job, he has no idea that it will force him to delve deeply into his own past. Undeterred by obstacles he is determined to complete his assignment. But he may realize too late that his success will permanently alter his future.

It started with a haunting image: a Ford Explorer, iridiscent in the moonlight and alone on a desolate stretch of beach. Its owner, Melissa Gibbons, has gone missing. Her husband says she flew the coop. But Los Angeles Deputy DA Rachel Knight is convinced otherwise: Melissa Gibbons has been murdered. So begins the confounding case that Rachel must present before a disbelieving jury. A dissatisfied heiress and her philandering husband - what really happened?