Showing results by narrator "Michael Garcia" in All Categories

In "The Pit and the Pendulum," one of his most famous short works, a condemned man is judged guilty by the Spanish Inquisition and sentenced to die. Locked away in a pitch-black cell, he soon discovers a pit in the center of the room, a watery grave at its base. Above him hangs a large, razor-sharp pendulum. As the man is slowly tortured, he must face either the pit or the pendulum.

“A mesmerizing storyteller who seems almost unnaturally able to enter the tormented inner lives of her characters.” —Denver Post Black Dahlia & White Rose is a brilliant collection of short fiction from National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates, one...

In 2101, having conquered the Solar System, most humans are choosing to tie their minds to an Artificial Intelligence. The only place to be free of AI is living off-world, with Saturn and its vast system of moons serving as the wild frontier. The only caveats to living there: the funds to fly a billion miles into space and a pledge to keep vigil against the threat of AI. Otherwise, what you do out there is your business.

While many investors fear a rapid rise in inflation, author Gary Shilling, an award-winning economic forecaster, argues that the global economy is going through a long period of deleveraging and weak growth, which makes deflation far more likely and a far greater threat to investors than inflation. Shilling explains with clear language and compelling logic why the world economy will struggle for several more years and what investors can do to protect and grow their wealth in the difficult times ahead.

Collector Benjamin Byrd has added a new and eerie item to his archives: a set of fangs embedded in silver. As he grows more and more obsessed with his new treasure, he finds himself experiencing dreams and visionary adventures. Soon Benjamin's normal, successful routine is transformed beyond anything he ever imagined; he has to confront the truth that he is no longer simply human.

Jefferson Burke and the Secret of the Lost Scroll is a mystery as old as the Christian church wrapped in a modern-day thriller. Though an unwilling hero, professor Jefferson Burke's intellectual curiosity pits him against the powerful Bruno Krueger in a race to find a 2000-year-old scroll that...

This is the true story of the Clevenger family from Arizona Territory, and their unfortunate events as they trekked north to Washington Territory. Once the old, cantankerous Sam Clevenger and his wife, Charlotte, hired Frank Willson and John Johnson to help with the move, their fate took a dark turn. These true events were documented by journalists through the 1887 trial and well into the 1900s, and stories have been told of Sam's unfound treasure for nearly 130 years.

A boy's family travels to the Allegheny Mountains in order for the entomologist father to find an undiscovered moth he remembers seeing there in his youth. Over the course of the summer, the boy's sister, who suffers from autism, finds she can speak the language of various insects and creatures of nature, allowing her to understand the world around her for the first time in her life.

Champions of synthetic biology believe that turning genetic code into Lego-like blocks to build never-before-seen organisms could solve the thorniest challenges in medicine, energy, and environmental protection. But as the hackers who cracked open the potential of the personal computer and the Internet proved, the most revolutionary discoveries often emerge from out-of-the-way places, forged by brilliant outsiders with few resources besides boundless energy and great ideas.

During a live television broadcast on the night of a lunar eclipse, renowned astrophysicist Andrew Leland is suddenly lifted into the sky by a giant spacecraft and taken away for all to see. Six years later, he turns up wandering in the Sonoran Desert, thin, bearded, a ghost of his former self. Upon his return he denies ever having been abducted, refuses to cooperate with the government or media, and disappears from the public eye, supposedly becoming a hermit somewhere in the woodlands of the Midwest.

Second Lives takes us on a revelatory journey through the electronic looking glass as Tim Guest investigates one of the most bizarre phenomena of the 21st century: virtual lives.

It's 1959. Sixteen-year-old Alex Housman has just stolen his 14th car and frankly doesn't know why. His divorced, working-class father grinds out the night shift at the local Chevy plant in Detroit and looks forward to the flask in his glove compartment and the open bottles of booze in his Flint, Michigan, home. Broke and fighting to survive, Alex and his father face the realities of estrangement, incarceration, and even violence as their lives unfold toward the climactic episode that a New York Times reviewer called "one of the most profoundly powerful in American fiction."

The ringed planet and its moons remain the Wild West as the crew delves into the meaning of what makes us human, what is freedom anyway, and exploring these truths—space is hard, relationships are complicated, shit happens, and just as art is subjective, evil is often defined by the eye of the beholder.

Life is full of joy when it's least expected in this sweet Amish romance from the author of The Gift of Hope. Joshua Kanagy’s older brother has left the family gift shop business, which is wonderful gute for Aaron, but not for Joshua. Horses are his talent—raising and training them. But how...

Pliny is the newly appointed governor of a turbulent and corrupt frontier province seething with hatred of Rome. When a high Roman official is found murdered on a desolate hillside, Pliny must investigate the devotees of a barbarian god whose ranks may include a murderer, an unscrupulous faith healer who knows everyone’s secrets, and a boy who struggles toward manhood though stricken with the "sacred disease." As Pliny pursues one lead after another, he is betrayed where he least expects it.

In the 1960s, strangers to their new city and from the different worlds of New York and Athens, David and Nikos embarked on a life together, a partnership that would endure for 40 years. At a moment of "absolute respect for differences", London offered a freedom in love unattainable in their previous homes. Here is a luminous evocation of a world of writers, poets, artists, and thinkers.

ShadowStrike poisoned the water of Trinity Falls two months ago. Now the Trinity Four, the teens most affected by the poison, have been isolated in a remote mansion under 24-hour medical care while scientists on four continents rush to discover a cure. Meanwhile, US operatives scour the world for the bioterrorists responsible for this heinous crime as two teen virtual spies, also infected, hunt for the criminals on the Internet.

When Cora Holman’s mother dies, she assumes the inevitable: that her mother overdosed on the painkillers she’d been taking for years. So she’s shocked to learn that her mother and a neighbor both died of a brain aneurysm the same night. When Cora and other neighborhood teens become ill with a mysterious flu, and government-type strangers arrive in her small town, they all fear the unthinkable - a terrorist attack. Meanwhile, a world away in Pakistan, a 16-year-old computer genius named Shahzad is working as a virtual spy....

Nolan Jackson is a journeyman carpenter by trade and a wanderer by nature. And in 2007, while fellow Americans fight in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Nolan roams, traveling between jobs building tract homes across the West. Following a shocking workplace accident in Las Vegas, he uproots himself from the tentative relationships he has made and heads toward the ocean.

The second Locustan invasion has just begun, and the galaxy is already teetering. Milos is leading the fight but taking heavy losses. Annihilation seems inevitable. The galaxy's hope rests on finding the Fury, an ancient weapon of the legendary Unosi, which, if the legends are to be believed, had once stopped the Locustans. But the path to it has been long forgotten. Ramya Kiroff sets off on a journey to find it, with hopes of delivering a miracle to the galaxy.