Showing results by narrator "Christian Baskous" in All Categories

One Native Life is a look back down the road Richard Wagamese has traveled - from childhood abuse to adult alcoholism - in reclaiming his identity. It's about what he has learned as a human being, a man, and an Ojibway in his 52 years on Earth. Whether he's writing about playing baseball, running away with the circus, making bannock, or attending a sacred bundle ceremony, these are stories told in a healing spirit. Through them, Wagamese reveals to listeners how to appreciate life for the journey it is.

Off the blustery streets in the medieval heart of Budapest, Captain Tucker Wayne and his war dog, Kane, rescue a mysterious woman fleeing three armed men. The secret she holds will unlock a terrible treasure, one steeped in blood and treachery, tied to a crime going back to the fall of Nazi Germany and a heritage of suffering and pain that reaches out from the past to wreak havoc today.

The New York Yankees have won 27 world championships and 40 American League pennants, both world records. Their pinstripe swag is a symbol of "making it" across the globe. Yet some 25 years ago, from 1989 to 1992, the Yankees were a pitiful team at the bottom of the standings, sitting on a 14-year World Series drought and a 35 percent drop in attendance. To make the statistics worse, their mercurial, bombastic owner was banned from baseball. But out of these ashes emerged the modern Yankees dynasty, a juggernaut built on the sly, a brilliant mix of personalities, talent, and ambition.

As a young reporter, Arthur Crane exposed the secrets behind the Orchid Killer, a cult murderer from the late '60s whose crimes blackened the end of the Summer of Love. Half a century later, Arthur wakes to find an orchid resting on his pillow, a symbol of death from a killer connected to his estranged younger brother, Christian. To discover the horrifying truth, Arthur will risk all - even his very soul - for Christian may not be the brother that Arthur remembers....

A flock of great blue herons descending through a snowstorm to the streets of New York.... A river in Nebraska disappearing mysteriously.... A ghostly herd of buffalo that sings a song of death.... A mystic who raises constellations of stones from the desert floor.... All these are to be found in Winter Count, the exquisite and rapturous collection by the National Book Award-winning author of Arctic Dreams.

The well-meaning protagonists of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara are caught - to both disastrous and hilarious effect - in the maelstrom of political and social upheaval surrounding them. Ben Fountain's prize-winning debut speaks to the intimate connection between the foreign, the familiar, and the inescapably human.

PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and New York Times best-selling author Ron Rash turns again to Appalachia to capture lives haunted by violence and tenderness, hope and fear, in unforgettable stories that span from the Civil War to the present day. In the title story, two drug-addicted friends return to the farm where they worked as boys to steal their former boss' gruesomely unusual war trophies. In "The Trusty", which first appeared in The New Yorker, a prisoner sent to fetch water for his chain gang tries to sweet-talk a farmer's young wife into helping him escape, only to find that she is as trapped as he is.

Nick Hornby meets Patti Smith, Mean Streets meets A Visit from the Goon Squad in this quintessential New York City story about two people who knew each other in the downtown music scene in the 1980s, meet again in the present day, and fall in love.

An unlikely friendship between a septuagenarian and a younger woman becomes a story of broken trust, lost love, and the unexpected blooming of hope against the longest odds.

A few months after the outbreak of the War of 1812, Captain David Porter set out in the USS Essex on an epic, seventeen-month cruise to the South Seas. Porter was pursuing fame and riches, and by most accounts his odyssey was a stunning success: it brought glory to the fledgling American navy, cemented Porter's reputation as a daring and talented commander, and has long been celebrated as one of the greatest maritime adventures in U.S. history. Less well known, however, is the terrible price that the crew of the Essex paid for their captain's outsized ambitions.

How is it that we come to consider our parents as people with rich and intense lives that include but also exclude us? Richard Ford's parents - Edna, a feisty, pretty Catholic-school girl with a difficult past; and Parker, a sweet-natured, soft-spoken traveling salesman - were rural Arkansans born at the turn of the 20th century. Married in 1928, they lived "alone together" on the road, traveling throughout the South. Eventually they had one child, born late, in 1944.

A military research station buried in the remote Sierra Nevada Mountains of Northern California broadcasts a frantic distress call that ends with a chilling order: "This is sierra, victor, whiskey. There's been a breach. Failsafe initiated. No matter the outcome: Kill us.... Kill us all."

In the wilds of Mongolia, a research satellite has crashed, triggering an explosive search for its valuable cargo: a code-black physics project connected to the study of dark energy — and a shocking image of the eastern seaboard of the United States in utter ruin. At the Vatican, a package arrives containing two strange artifacts: a skull scrawled with ancient Aramaic and a tome bound in human skin. DNA evidence reveals that both came from the same body: the long dead Mongol king Genghis Khan.

Richard Wagamese, one of Canada’s most celebrated Indigenous authors and storytellers, was a writer of breathtaking honesty and inspiration. Always striving to be a better, stronger person, Wagamese shared his journey through writing, encouraging others to do the same. Following the success of Embers, this new collection of Wagamese’s nonfiction works, curated by editor Drew Hayden Taylor, brings together more of the prolific author’s short writings - many for the first time in print - and celebrates his ability to inspire.

Size does matter in these delightfully tiny tales populated with narcoleptic drivers, bickering backers, suspicious spouses, and other memorable characters. Full of dark humor, intrigue, and absurdity, this collection of slightly sinister (and occasionally sweet) stories delivers a bite-size listening experience to satisfy any literary craving.

Now, in this collection of interconnected short stories, Jennifer Haigh returns to the vividly imagined world of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, a coal mining town rocked by decades of painful transition. From its heyday during two World Wars through its slow decline, Bakerton is a town that refuses to give up gracefully, binding - sometimes cruelly - succeeding generations to the place that made them. A young woman glimpses a world both strange and familiar when she becomes a live-in maid for a Jewish family in New York City. A long-absent brother makes a sudden and tragic homecoming.

American War meets Into the Wild in Brian Hart’s epic saga of one man’s struggle to survive a hostile world - tracing his path from a self-destructive, skateboarding youth in the '90s to the near future as he journeys across a desolate, militia-controlled American West to find his missing family.

Set in 1937 in rural Tennessee, with the construction of a monumental dam serving as background, Watershed delivers a gripping story of characters whose ambitions and yearnings threaten to overflow the banks of their time and place. Nathan, an engineer hiding from his past, and Claire, a housewife, struggle to find their footing in the newly electrified, job-hungry, post-Depression South. As Nathan wrestles with a secret guilt and tangled love, Claire struggles to balance motherhood and a newfound freedom that awakens ambitions and a sexuality she hadn't known she possessed.

Composed of a series of touchstone moments, Tiny Americans is a thrilling and bittersweet rendering of a family that, much like the tides, continues to come together and drift apart.

When Jack Parker’s father dies, Jack knows one thing: Tom Parker was a good man. Beyond that, decades of distance and silence had kept the two men from truly knowing each other. Jack attends the funeral with the hope he can shovel some dirt onto Tom’s casket, collect a few commiserations, and put miles between himself and the questions he’d let simmer since he’d left home years before. But when a group of strangers appears at the funeral, Jack realizes he has more questions than answers about how his father actually lived his life.