Showing results by narrator "Natasha Soudek" in All Categories

From the opening story, "Willing" - about a second-rate movie actress in her 30s who has moved back to Chicago, where she makes a seedy motel room her home and becomes involved with a mechanic who has not the least idea of who she is as a human being - Birds of America unfolds a startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the unhinged, the lost, the unsettled of our America. Lorrie Moore explores the personal and the universal, the idiosyncratic and the mundane, with all the wit, brio, and verve that have made her one of the best storytellers of our time.

John Irving, one of the world’s greatest novelists, returns with his first novel in seven years — a ghost story, a love story, and a lifetime of sexual politics. In Aspen, Colorado, in 1941, Rachel Brewster is a slalom skier at the National Downhill and Slalom Championships. Little Ray, as...

Illuminate your purpose and your path through tarot and astrology. Tarot and astrology can be effective tools when you need to work through complicated feelings and questions. This comprehensive guide examines how useful the two practices can be when combined, highlighting the insight they offer into relationships, personal decisions, and so much more.

Adolf Hitler has taken a long time to die, despite the lethal efficiency of the gun he put to his head in April 1945. Although eagerly anticipated around the world, there were no available witnesses to his suicide—and his corpse was not put on display. This created the perfect vacuum for myth and survival legends, while rival intelligence agencies and propaganda further confounded the investigations of successive historians.

A LOCUS AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST NOVELLA Fix the past. Save the present. Stop the future. Master of science fiction Alastair Reynolds unfolds a time-traveling climate fiction adventure in Permafrost. 2080: at a remote site on the edge of the Arctic Circle, a group of scientists, engineers and...

Danny Tozer has a problem: She just inherited the powers of Dreadnought, the world's greatest superhero. Until Dreadnought fell out of the sky and died right in front of her, Danny was trying to keep people from finding out she's transgender. But before he expired, Dreadnought passed his mantle to her, and those secondhand superpowers transformed Danny's body into what she's always thought it should be. Now there's no hiding that she's a girl.

Only nine months after her debut as the superhero Dreadnought, Danny Tozer is already a scarred veteran. Protecting a city the size of New Port is a team-size job and she's doing it alone. Between her newfound celebrity and her demanding cape duties, Dreadnought is stretched thin, and it's only going to get worse. When she crosses a billionaire supervillain, Dreadnought comes under attack from all quarters. From her troubled family life to her disintegrating friendship with Calamity, there's no lever too cruel for this villain to use against her.

Agreeing to accompany her father's people back to their homeworld, Kira Forrest prepares for the fight of her life. She's agreed to undertake the Trial of the Broken, a rite of passage every member of her father's House must pass. It offers a path to independence and freedom that is too tempting to deny. Not everyone welcomes this lost daughter of Roake. There are those who fear what her presence might bring to light. Betrayal stalks the halls of Kira's birthplace-its roots embedded deep in the events that claimed her parent's lives and set her on her current path.  

Traveling to the planet of Jettie in the hopes of finding safe harbor for her niece, Kira arrives only to find their destination host to the quorum - a series of dangerous contests that hold the power to decide the fate of empires. With little choice but to participate, it doesn't take long for Kira to find herself knee deep in enemies. Surrounded on all sides, Kira will have to face her worst fear: trusting others with the truth. Because it's becoming clear the tsavitee are no longer content to exist in the shadows. War is coming.

Kira Forrest is a survivor. She's risen above the pain of her beginnings to become a war hero only to leave it all behind in the pursuit of a simple life. Now a salvager, she makes a living sifting through the wreckage of dead alien ships from a war that nearly brought humanity to its knees. After her ship takes damage, she's forced to re-route to a space station where her past and present collide with dangerous consequences. Kira's existence holds the key to a faltering peace treaty with the Tuann - a technologically advanced alien race who dislikes and distrusts all humans.

A courier for the shadow world no more, Aileen's former protection is gone. Alone but still defiant, she survives one night at a time. Sure, working a dead-end job isn't part of every young vampire's dreams, but it pays the bills. When the darkly seductive Liam calls in a favor, she'll find her carefully constructed world tilting on its axis as he draws her into a dangerous game against a wily enemy. The High Fey - creatures as powerful and beautiful as they are deadly - have come to town, their motivations unclear as lines are drawn and shadowy alliances made.

Brought to you by Penguin. The future is no more, and eternity has begun. It's 1986 and a nuclear reactor has exploded in Chernobyl. Syvert Løyning returns home from military service to live with his mother and brother on the outskirts of a town in Southern Norway. One night, he dreams of his...

Chasing the trail of the woman who was once considered her best friend, Kira Forrest returns to the planet of her birth. When a near deadly incident jeopardizes her arrival, Kira will find the secrets she's worked so hard to hide bubbling to the surface one by one. Her only hope to control her destiny and protect the ones she loves is to embark on a dangerous rite of passage that may require far more of her than she's willing to pay. For a hidden menace stalks her from the shadows—it's target those closest to her.

From BSFA award-winning author Gareth L. Powell comes the first in a new epic sci-fi trilogy exploring the legacies of war. The sentient warship Trouble Dog was built for violence, yet following a brutal war, she is disgusted by her role in a genocide. Stripped of her weaponry and seeking to atone, she joins the House of Reclamation, an organization dedicated to rescuing ships in distress. When a civilian ship goes missing in a disputed system, Trouble Dog and her new crew of loners, captained by Sal Konstanz, are sent on a rescue mission.

Whether disillusioned by the dominant church or unfulfilled by traditional expressions of faith, many of us long for a deeper spirituality. Victoria Loorz did. Coping with an unraveling vocation, identity, and planet, Loorz turned to the wanderings of spiritual leaders and the sanctuary of the natural world. With an ecospiritual lens on biblical narratives and a fresh look at a community larger than our own species, Church of the Wild uncovers the wild roots of faith and helps us deepen our commitment to a suffering earth by falling in love with it—and calling it church.

From legendary science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson comes a vision of climate change unlike any ever imagined. Told entirely through fictional eye-witness accounts, The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, the story of how climate change will affect us all over the decades to come. Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us - and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face.

Brought to you by Penguin. ***Longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction*** What do we choose to remember and what do we allow ourselves to forget? Visit the Antidote of Uz – a prairie witch who can keep your memories safe. Speak into her emerald-green earhorn, and your secrets, your...

In September 1913, a young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills.

Working from a strong base in attachment theory, esteemed clinician Ruth Cohn explores ways therapists can recognize the signs of childhood neglect, provides recommendations for understanding lasting effects that can persist into adulthood, and lays out strategies for helping clients maximize therapeutic outcomes. Along with extensive clinical material, chapters introduce skills that therapists can develop and hone, such as the ability to recognize and discern nonverbal attempts at communication.

New research has uncovered deeply buried military secrets—both the Allied and Axis special operations during WWII included monsters. Did the Soviets use a dragon to win the Battle of Kursk? Did a vampire fight for the Canadians in Holland? Did the US drop the second atomic bomb on a kaiju? This collection takes real events from World War II and injects them with fantastical creatures that mirror the “unreality” of war itself. Each story—and two poems—feature mythical, mystical, and otherwise unexplainable beings that change the course of history.