Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Anthologies

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.

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.

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 Columbia Workshop aired on CBS radio from 1936 until 1947. Created by Irving Reis, it was an experimental platform with no boundaries for what radio had to offer. Broadcast from New York, it featured the biggest stars from stage, screen and radio including Orson Welles, Burgess Meredith, Agnes Moorehead, Art Carney, Charles Laughton, Vincent Price and Laurence Olivier. Stories were by William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, Lucille Fletcher, Carl Sandburg and Herman Melville with music by Bernard Herrmann.

Leo Dershowitz gave up hope of artistic glory long ago. A mediocre painter at best, he relies on the generosity of women to pay the bills. One day, Leo stumbles across a grisly means of inspiration and - in a flash - his fate changes forever. Before long, nothing can stop Leo from creating masterpieces, but at what cost?

Incendiary Girls explores our baser instincts with vivid imagination and humor. In these stories, our bodies become strange and unfamiliar terrain, a medium for transformation. In "Fundamental Laws of Nature", a doctor considers her legacy, both good and bad, when she discovers that her mother has been reincarnated as a thoroughbred mare. In the title story, a mischievous angel chronicles the remarkable life of a girl just beyond death’s reach.

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.

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.

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.

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.

After losing her father to whiskey and her mother to cancer, all Prudence has left is skiing. She hitchhikes to a remote ski area in New Mexico - someplace no one would look for her, if they were looking. She manages to land a job with the ski patrol. Their gruff kindness, and the fact that she has nobody else, strengthens her resolve to prove herself on the mountain. So when a blizzard descends as fierce and blinding as God, she refuses to show her fear or be left behind.

She will never forget that summer - when the bones began to surface. The decomposing skull of a dog, then that of a cat. Later, birds. Her parents even made a game of digging them up while the children played and kept the tiny trophies on display in their home. And then her cousin was implicated in a grisly murder. Did that strange find really mark the creation of a monster in their midst? From the acclaimed author of Monster comes this chilling story of a long-buried childhood memory and a family bent on denial.

When Kate, a physics grad student recently dumped by her professor boyfriend, gets a frantic phone call from a childhood friend, she's more than happy for the distraction. Though she hasn't seen the luminous Lana in years, she can tell Lana's crisis is genuine: her younger sister's joined the Sisters of the Northern Star. The real story - of forgiveness, friendship, and lost hope - unfolds as the two drive from New York to Nevada to collect Lana's sister from a cult that may not be as dangerous as it seems.

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.

Her father left years ago, her mother is dissolving into gin and cigarettes, and her brother has lost himself to drugs. In these four linked stories, a young woman tries to come to terms with the addiction and desertion that caused her family to crumble.

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.

Psychiatrist Dr. Renee Conway has taken on a new patient: Kevin Reynolds, the local hero who ran into a burning building to save a young family from certain death. When the rescue goes horrifically wrong, a boy is dead and Kevin suffers excruciating burns. Plagued with nightmares and left with a horribly disfigured face, Kevin finds celebrity its own torture.

The catcher is a statistical savant, the first baseman speaks in Buddhist koans, and the twin star pitchers may or may not derive mystical powers from scars betraying their Siamese birth. In fact, everything about the Birmingham Barons baseball team is remarkable - except for their performance on the field. For decades, the Barons have been woefully mediocre and Pudge Morrison - former better-than-average left fielder now long past his prime - has become the symbol for the team's disappointment.

Unemployed Colin is living back at home in the small town where he grew up in the shadow of his older brother and a gang of neighborhood bullies. He's still struggling to overcome his best friend Danny's unexpected death five years before. The strange series of events that took place on Danny's last night haunt Colin, and as he puts the pieces together, he discovers it may not have been an accident after all.

Her high school reunion is coming up, and advice columnist Jenn Kramer couldn't be dreading it more - until she lays eyes on Marcos. Jenn hardly noticed him when they were kids, but now he's all grown up...and how deliciously he's changed.