Showing results by publisher "HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books" in World Literature

Lil Chris is just nineteen when he arrives at Angola as an AU—an admitting unit, a fresh fish, a new 'vict. He's got a life sentence with no chance of parole, but he's also got a clear mind and sharp awareness—one that picks up quickly on the details of the system, his fellow inmates, and what he can do to claim a place at the top. When he meets Rise, a mature inmate who's already spent years in the system, Lil Chris learns to find his way in a system bent on repressing every means he has to express himself.

It's 1971 when Louise leaves Oregon for Düsseldorf, a city grappling with its nation's horrific recent history, to study art. Soon she's embroiled in a scene dramatically different from the one at home, thanks in large part to Dieter, a mercurial musician. Their romance ignites quickly, but life gets in the way: an unplanned pregnancy, hasty marriage, the tense balance of their creative ambitions, and - finally, fatally - a family secret that shatters Dieter, and drives Louise home. But in 2008 she's headed to Dieter's mother's funeral.

Teeming with life and compulsively listenable, the pieces gathered together in The Tribe aggregate into an extraordinary mosaic of Cuba today. Carlos Manuel Álvarez, one of the most exciting young writers in Latin America, employs the cronica form—a genre unique to Latin American writing that blends reportage, narrative nonfiction, and novelistic forms—to illuminate a particularly turbulent period in Cuban history, from the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with the US, to the death of Fidel Castro, to the convulsions of the San Isidro Movement.

Jack Duncan is a high school senior whose dream is to play baseball in college and beyond - as far away from Delano as possible. He longs to escape the political turmoil surrounding the labor struggles of the striking fieldworkers that infests his small ag town. Ever since his father, a grape grower, died under suspicious circumstances 10 years earlier, he's had to be the sole emotional support of his mother.

In a quiet forest in Belarus, two boys stumble across a long-kept secret: the mass grave where Stalin's police secretly murdered thousands in the 1930s. The results of the subsequent investigation have far-reaching effects, and across the Atlantic in Toronto, Leah Jarvis, a lively, curious young lawyer, finds herself tasked with an impossible case: the deportation of elderly Stefan Drozd, who fled his crimes in Kurapaty for a new identity in Canada.

Max Pzoras is the poster child for the American dream. The child of Greek immigrants who grew up in a dangerous New York housing project, he triumphed over his upbringing and became a successful Wall Street analyst. Yet on the frigid December night that his mother dies of cancer and he's involved in a violent street scuffle, Max begins to confront the nagging questions he has about life. He begins his search for answers by impulsively traveling to India, first to the foothills of the Himalayas and then to an ashram in the drought-stricken south.

Chasing Whispers is a unique Afro-irrealist collection of Black speculative fiction in transformative stories of culture, longing, hybridity, unlimited futures, a collision of worlds, and folklore. It contains thirteen stories, eleven of which are original, with a commanding introduction by D. Harlan Wilson. The collection is aligned with the themes of Eugen Bacon's other fiction, and her recognition in the honor list of the 2022 Otherwise Fellowships for "doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction."

Intimate and richly detailed, The Beauty of Living begins with E. E. Cummings's Cambridge upbringing and his relationship with his socially progressive but domestically domineering father. It follows Cummings through his undergraduate experience at Harvard, where he fell into a circle of aspiring writers including John Dos Passos, who became a lifelong friend. Steeped in classical paganism and literary Decadence, Cummings and his friends rode the explosion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagism, and other "modern" movements in the arts.

Wrought with warmth and wit, Jacobs's debut novel digs into Pasadena's most infamous structure and the city itself. In their journey to discover the source of the bridge's macabre alter ego, Nick Chance and his impish mutt interact with some of the big personalities from the Progressive Age, including Teddy Roosevelt, Upton Sinclair, Charles Fletcher Lummis, and Lilly and Adolphus Busch. They cavort and often sow chaos at Cawston Ostrich Farm, the Mount Lowe Railway, the Hotel Green, and even the Doo Dah Parade.

"When I was 16, Helen Fleischman assigned me to memorize Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 29, 'When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state', for English class. And 50 years later, that poem is still in my head. Algebra got washed away, and geometry and most of biology, but those lines about the redemptive power of love in the face of shame are still here behind my eyeballs, more permanent than my own teeth." --Garrison Keillor

In her striking second collection, Natalie Scenters-Zapico sets her unflinching gaze once again on the borders of things. Lima :: Limon illuminates both the sweet and the sour of the immigrant experience, of life as a woman in the US and Mexico, and of the politics of the present day. Her lyrical poems focus on the often-tested resilience of women. Scenters-Zapico writes heartbreakingly about domestic violence and its toxic duality of macho versus hembra, of masculinity versus femininity, and throws into harsh relief the all-too-normalized pain that women endure.

Stavros Stavros Mavrakis, Greek immigrant and proud owner of the Gala Diner in New Jersey, believes he has just 10 days left to live. He sends a scathing email to his estranged ex-wife and three grown daughters, outlining his wishes for how they each might better their lives. He then prepares for his final hours and wonders why he is alone.

Michael and Wendy Mixner are a Brooklyn-based couple whose marriage is failing in the wake of a personal tragedy. Michael, a Wall Street trader, is meanwhile keeping a secret: He's lost the couple's life savings. And Wendy, a digital marketing strategist, has been hired onto a data-mining project of epic scale, whose mysterious creator has ambitions to reshape America's social and political landscapes. When Michael's best friend is murdered, the evidence leads back to Wendy's client, setting off a dangerous chain of events that will profoundly change the couple - and the country.

How does a Mexican American, the son of poor immigrants, leave his border home and move to the heart of gringo America? How does he adapt to the worlds of wealth, elite universities, the rush and power of New York City? How does he make peace with a stern, old-fashioned father who has only known hard field labor his whole life? Troncoso tells his luminous stories through the lens of an exile adrift in the 21st century, his characters suffering from the loss of culture and language, the loss of roots and home as they adapt to the glittering promises of new worlds that seem so empty.

As far as romance goes, Dr. Jakob Sammelsohn is fairly incurable. Twice married, once divorced, once widowed - all by the tender age of 12 - he finally flees his small village and his pious, vengeful father. A lovelorn Candide, young Dr. Sammelsohn wanders optimistically through history - pursued by the amorous ghost of his dead wife.

Samrat Upadhyay's thrilling new collection brings stories of thieves, lovers, political prisoners, fractured families, and of Nepali-Americans attempting to navigate the strange customs of the United States. It reaffirms Upadhyay's brilliant contributions to the international literature of exile.

Jeremy Jordan and Alexandra Chen hope to make a quiet home together but struggle to find a space safe from their personal secrets. For Jeremy, this means leaving behind his former life as an intelligence operative during The Troubles in Northern Ireland. For Alexandra, a high-powered job in image management for whole countries cannot prepare her for her missing brother's sudden reappearance. In a culture of limitless surveillance, Jeremy and Alexandra will go to great lengths to protect what is closest to them and answer the question of whether their love will be returned.

A Chinese woman moves from Beijing to London for a doctoral program - and to begin a new life - just as the Brexit campaign reaches a fever pitch. Isolated and lonely in a Britain increasingly hostile to foreigners, she meets a landscape architect and the two begin to build a life together.

Radiant and tender, My Baby First Birthday is a collection that examines innocence, asking us who gets to be loved and who has to deplete themselves just to survive. It's about existence and nonexistence, about being born - without consent. Jenny Zhang writes about accepting pain, about the way we fetishize womanhood and motherhood, and reduce women to their violations, traumas, and body parts.

It is the summer of 1948 when a handsome, charismatic stranger, Charlie Beale, recently back from the war in Europe, shows up in the town of Brownsburg, a sleepy village in the Valley of Virginia. All he has with him are two suitcases. Finding work at the local butcher shop, Charlie befriends the owner and his family. And it is through the shop that Charlie gradually meets all the townsfolk, including Boaty Glass, Brownsburg's wealthiest citizen, and most significantly, Boaty's beautiful teenage bride, Sylvan.