Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Literature & Fiction

Is love possible in the Viagra generation? Divorced for 30 years, Anny has given up on love and concentrates on her career. She is looking for controversy and hopes that her column will bring her fame and fortune. On a date, Anny meets and interviews Marv Rothstein, a handsome, 75-year-old, emotionally unavailable diamond dealer. Anny is attracted to Marv, and they become involved in a torrid affair. But very soon, Anny discovers that the elusive Marv is a serial dater prowling the singles sites for younger women.

It’s December 23, and Clara Dunphy is running around Oxford Street like a chicken with its head cut off trying to pick up “a few lastminute bits and bobs.” Despite the frenzy, the twicedivorced mother of three loves Christmas and always wants to make it perfect—a challenge even in the best of times but particularly when “family” means an extended network of inlaws, outlaws, exstepfathers, and hangerson totaling sixteen. Is the madness of Christmas really worth it?

With her children evacuated and her husband at the front, Tory Pace is grudgingly sharing the family home with her irascible mother, working at the local gelatin factory - to help the war effort - and generally doing just about as well as could be expected in difficult times. Her quiet life is thrown into turmoil, however, when her prisoner-of-war husband, Donald, makes an outrageous demand for sexual gratification: He wants a dirty letter!

Not so long ago, Lizzie Glass had a successful TV show, a cookbook deal, and a social diary crammed with parties and events. But fame doesn't stay fresh for long. Her show fizzles, her magazine column is canceled, and Lizzie's only option is a summer job as personal chef to the Silvesters, a wealthy and eccentric family. Their beach house is a lavish, beautifully decorated palace on the Jersey Shore, and Lizzie gets to work catering to Kathryn and Jim Silvester's fashionably restrictive diets.

Rory, the youngest son, runs a business that rents out the grand mansions for weddings and tours to help the owners pay upkeep on their dilapidated estates. Enter Maggie, an American TV journalist sent to London to do an expose on the aristocracy. She hires Rory to get her access to the most private families. The two immediately clash, bickering until a romance springs up where it seemed least likely.

Aristotle "Aris" Thibodeau is 12 and a half years old and destined for greatness. Ever since her father's death, however, she's been stuck in the small town of Kanuga, Georgia, where she has to manage her mother Diane's floundering love life and dubious commitment to her job as an English professor, not to mention coparenting a little brother who hogs all the therapy money. Luckily Aris has a plan. Following the advice laid out in Write a Novel in Thirty Days!, she sets out to pen a best seller using her charmingly dysfunctional family as material.

Dr. Robert Heller is one of New York City’s leading veterinarians, and his "Ask Dr. Bob" advice column is hugely popular among pet lovers. Yet Dr. Bob understands animals a lot better than people, and he could definitely use some advice of his own - especially when it comes to his family. As for Bob’s wife, Anna, she is all but perfect, assuming one can ignore her own colorful but deeply dysfunctional clan. And then, just when Bob thinks he’s figured out what it takes to thrive in the human world as comfortably as he does among cats, dogs, and hamsters, tragedy strikes. How can he go on living when he is suddenly, soul-killingly alone?

Chuckle along with the best 19th-century humorists, who provide you with tall tales, puns, and witty ripostes. No guarantees of political correctness, but they're sure to tickle your 21st-century funny bone! Beginning with the piece that made Mark Twain famous -- "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" -- and ending with his fanciful "How I Edited an Agricultural Paper," this anthology collects several of Twain's own pieces in addition to tall tales, fables, and satires by 14 of Twain's contemporaries.

In the space of a few torrid months on the Iowa prairie, Phillipa Maakestad - long-married theater professor and mother of an unstable daughter - grapples with a life turned upside down. After falling headlong into a passionate affair during a semester spent teaching in Ohio, Phillipa returns home to Iowa for her daughter Ginny's wedding. There, Phillipa must endure (among other things) a wedding-day tornado, a menace of a mother-in-law who may or may not have been a Nazi collaborator, and the tragicomic revenge fantasies of her heretofore docile husband.

Gavin Greene is a hopeless romantic. He’s also a professional one: He writes the wedding column for a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper, covering spectacular parties from coast to coast. But there’s a thin line between being a hotshot reporter on assignment and being a single guy alone on a Saturday night at someone else’s wedding. Everything changes on New Year’s Eve when Gavin meets Melinda, a travel writer with enchanting dimples....

In Banshee, Samantha Baxter - wife, mother, poetry professor - learns she has breast cancer and then ruins her own life. Tumbling through a catastrophic midlife crisis, she gives herself permission to partake in behaviors she's observed in her male colleagues, including having an affair with a student her daughter's age, ranting at board meetings, and telling her poetry students what she really thinks of their work. Underneath biting, witty narration lurks a childish, confused, and unrealized adult woman hell-bent on destroying her relationships and professional life.

When Amanda Bright decides to leave her career to be a stay-at-home mom, she finds that her college degree, her professional wardrobe, and glamorous friends and connections are no preparation for her new life. Gone are the days of meetings and power lunches; Amanda's days are now filled with changing diapers, mopping up spills, and singing "The Itsy, Bitsy Spider" over and over. While everyone else around her is on the fast track, it's getting harder for Amanda to even remember - or appreciate - why she left work in the first place.

Stella Bradberry and Bella Chambers work for Atlantic Energy, a global oil company in London. Bella is a pretty single mother who dropped out of college and is doomed to work as an invisible assistant to a series of men of half her intelligence. Stella is 20 years older, about to get a seat on the board, and is the original no-glass-ceiling, high-achieving, multi-tasking mother of two. So what possesses both women to embark on affairs with men they wouldn't have looked twice at outside the office?

Siem Sigerius is a beloved, brilliant professor of mathematics with a promising future in politics. His family - including a loving wife, two gorgeous, intelligent stepdaughters, and a successful future son-in-law - and carefully appointed home in the bucolic countryside complete the portrait of a comfortable, morally upright household.

Stoned out of his skull - this is how we find washed-up New York magazine writer Digby Maxwell when he is offered a last chance to redeem himself by becoming editor of a small philosophy magazine headquartered in a rural Vermont college town. Digby’s assignment is to make the magazine relevant to contemporary culture. For starters, that requires several more tokes, very deep tokes.

"You're in a slump." Nick Lasseter's boss is talking about his job performance as a reporter for the Waterloo Weekly, but he might as well be talking about Nick's whole life. His current assignment, a profile of a legendary liberal ex-congressman, is in trouble even before the subject abruptly dies.

In this funny, self-deprecating tale, Fran Clark experiences her 37th birthday as a surprisingly desperate housewife entering a panicky spiral downward to depression. It takes her children and her two best friends, counting on her more than they'd ever anticipated, for her to find the inner strength to rebuild her life.

Little did the obscure novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton know in 1830 when he penned that most relished, imitated, and lampooned opening sentence in English literature, "It was a dark and stormy night..." that his words would inspire countless aspiring writers struggling incessantly like boats against the current to emulate his unparalleled style and that his name would grace "The Bulwer-Lytton Contest" honoring his most successful followers. Get it? Abounding in shameless sentences, this audio rendition of the original contest is a hilarious - even perversely instructive - collection of skilled, inept writing. Compiler Scott Rice is a professor of English at San Jose State University and the creator of the contest. The narrators include Marni Webb, Ray Nakamoto, Rachel Songer, and Bob Nathan.

As spring comes to quiet Benteen County, Kansas, so do murder and bombs. When a man dies with an arrow in his back, the prime suspect is Sheriff English's brother, Mad Dog, who must find a link between the unlikely mix of arrows and bombs.

With this satirical novella, English schoolmaster Edwin A. Abbott provides both a mathematical fantasy and pointed observations on the social hierarchy of Victorian culture. The narrator, “a Square,” resides in the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland. When he is visited by a sphere, he is suddenly faced with proof of the existence of three dimensions and is forced to see the limitations of his world.