Showing results by narrator "Robert Fass" in All Categories

When the celebrated Russian-born architect Roman Guttman is injured in a bus bombing, his perceptions become heightened and disturbed, leading him on an ill-advised journey into Palestinian territory. His odyssey alternates with the bittersweet diary of his teenage daughter Anyusha - on her own perilous path - and the startlingly alive observations of Amir, the young Palestinian who pushed the button and is now damned to watch the havoc he has wrought from a shaky beyond.

Adam Gorozpe, a respected businessman in Mexico, has a life so perfect that he might as well be his namesake in the Garden of Eden - but there are snakes in this Eden too. For one thing, Adam's wife, Priscila, has fallen in love with the brash director of national security - also named Adam. Another unlikely snake is the little Boy-God who's started preaching in the street wearing a white tunic and stick-on wings, inspiring Adam's brother-in-law to give up his job to follow this junior deity and implore Adam to do the same.

With more than 350,000 copies sold, the Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Election has taken its place as the defining document of the Trump administration. Replete with some of the most infamous characters and outlandish schemes in modern American history, the underlying evidence in the Special Counsel's written testimony could have been plucked from the script of a blockbuster movie.

An oral-history biography of the legendary Latin American writer and Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Márquez, brimming with atmosphere and insight.

In The Ape's Wife and Other Stories - Kiernan's 12th collection of short fiction since 2001 - she displays the impressive range that characterizes her work. With her usual disregard for genre boundaries, she masterfully navigates the territories that have traditionally been labeled dark fantasy, sword and sorcery, science fiction, steampunk, and neo-noir.

The year is 1968 and James Earl Ray has just shot Martin Luther King, Jr. For two months he evades authorities, driving to Canada, securing a fake passport, and flying to London, all while relishing the media's confusion about his location and his image on the FBI's Most Wanted list. Eventually he lands at the Hotel Portugal in Lisbon, where he anxiously awaits a visa to Angola. But the visa never comes, and for his last 10 days of freedom, Ray walks around Lisbon, paying for his pleasures and rehearsing his fake identities.

In this harrowing story based on authentic historical documents, we follow the career of Dr. Silas Weir, “Father of Gyno-Psychiatry,” as he ascends from professional anonymity to national renown. Humiliated by a procedure gone terribly wrong, Weir is forced to take a position at the New Jersey Asylum for Female Lunatics, where he reigns. There, he is allowed to continue his practice, unchecked for decades, making a name for himself by focusing on women who have been neglected by the state—women he subjects to the most grotesque modes of experimentation.

Some men retire on a hundred grand...or buy their wives mink coats with days of the week sewn in the lining...or fly to Rio for a good cup of coffee - but not Jim Morgan. Jim had a hundred thousand all right - neatly packed in stacks of 50s - only someone had made an expensive mistake. A mistake that put him on the run for his money - as well as his life.

Vera Sigall, now 80 years old, has lived a mysterious, ascetic life far from the limelight of literary circles. This powerful character has a profound effect on those around her - Daniel, an architect and her neighbor and friend, unhappy in his marriage and career; Emilia, a Franco-Chilean student who travels to Santiago to write a thesis on the elusive Vera; and Horacio, an acclaimed poet with whom Vera had a tumultuous, passionate affair in her youth. As Daniel, Emilia, and Horacio tell their stories, they reconstruct Vera's past, and search for their own identities.

Who are you, Malone? Just a little while ago you were a cop. That was before the two punks and their girl hit town. That was before they boosted a payroll and shot down a man and took your nine-year-old daughter as insurance to cover their getaway. Now you’re just a man. Scared. Not for yourself - that would be easy. But for your child, the only thing in the world you love enough to make you play ball with the kind of scum you’ve hated all your life.

Marketing executives and consumer advocates alike predict a future of brand-proof consumers, armed with technology and a sophisticated understanding of marketing techniques, who can effectively tune out ad campaigns. But as Rob Walker demonstrates, this widely accepted misconception has eclipsed the real changes in the way modern consumers relate to their brands of choice. Combine this with marketers' new ability to blur the line between advertising, entertainment, and public space, and you have dramatically altered the relationship between consumer and consumed.

Sam Brandt is a long-term denizen of Connecticut’s renowned Leverett School. As an English teacher, he has dedicated his life to providing his students with the same challenges, encouragement, and sense of possibility that helped him and his friends become themselves here half a lifetime ago.

Many authors have traveled and explored the out-of-doors, both in life and then in their books, proving themselves stalwart, audacious, even heroic; Andrew Farkas is not among them. He is brave enough to admit that the outdoors isn’t for him. Instead, in these essays Farkas reports on his bold explorations of a very different territory: the in-of-doors, the waiting rooms, kitchens, malls, bars, theaters, roadside motel rooms, and other places that feature temperature control, protection from rampaging predators, and a higher degree of comfort than can be found outside.

In a small town in the American South, it is night in the middle of the 20th century. Carter, a high-school teacher and football coach in the newly desegregated schools, is awaiting news of two of his students who have been in a serious altercation. Outside the building where Carter has kept his vigil, a crowd of townspeople have also gathered to keep watch. Carter must choose how much he wants to participate in the spectacle and how much he can afford to keep his distance.

In recent years, nicotine has become as verboten as many hard drugs. The literary styles in this volume are as varied as the moral quandaries herein, and the authors have successfully unleashed their incandescent imaginations on the subject matter, fashioning an immensely addictive collection.

A humorous yet practical five-step guide to ridding ourselves - and our companies - of the bureaucratic bottlenecks and red tape that plagues every office. How often in your life do you spend time following a rule or a procedure that makes no sense, offers little or no advantage and slows you down in the process? In a world of work governed by a system of well-intentioned rules, that's something that happens all too often. 

Set on the eve of America's involvement in World War II, Kim Brooks's debut novel, The Houseguest, examines a little-known aspect of the war - namely, the network of organizations that sought to help Jews abroad by aiding in their escape to Europe and the United States.

He was one of the most fascinating figures in 20th-century political history. Yet today, Elias Demetracopoulos is strangely overlooked - even though his life reads like an epic adventure story....

Haunted by the sudden death of her grown son, Countess Zigana Nadazdy-Hauke is as unhappy as she is elegant. But is she miserable enough to drown herself in the bath? That’s the conventional wisdom in Vienna. But Rheinhardt and Liebermann have another idea after meeting the poor soul’s much younger widower: Oktav Hauke is handsome and dashing, but also callous to the point of pathology, admittedly abusive, in debt up to his ears, and a serial surviving spouse: He’s lost two other rich older wives....

The battle to defeat ISIS was an unremittingly brutal and dystopian struggle, a multi-sided war of gritty local commandos and militias. Mike Giglio takes listeners to the heart of this shifting, uncertain conflict, capturing the essence of a modern war. At its peak, ISIS controlled a self-styled "caliphate" the size of Great Britain, with a population cast into servitude that numbered in the millions. Its territory spread across Iraq and Syria as its influence stretched throughout the wider world.