Showing results by narrator "Ray Porter" in All Categories

For 20 years, Merge Records has remained true to their belief that you can sign bands because you love their music and respect what they're trying to do. As giant corporate labels struggle for survival, Merge has garnered a secure and growing fan base while releasing some of the best music of our time. Our Noise is the history of the much loved label as seen by those who were there. It features interviews with and profiles of now releases some of indie rock's biggest names.

Just after a man falls in the snow and hits his head on a stone curb, a ghost arrives to take his soul to the afterlife. But something strange occurs: the man doesn't die. Flabbergasted, the ghost appeals to his boss for further direction and is instructed to stay with the man until the strange "problem" is worked out.

In this chilling story from New York Times best-selling author Jonathan Maberry, a cemetery worker in Pine Deep begins to suspect that the dead are not resting easy in their graves.

With the same profound attention to detail that is a hallmark of his previous acclaimed works of fiction National Book Award winner Ha Jin gives us a collection of stories that delves into the experience of Chinese immigrants in America. Ha Jin depicts here the full spectrum of immigrant life and the daily struggles - some minute, some grand - faced by these men, women, and children.

In the fall of 1863, the Union Army is in control of the Mississippi River and much of Louisiana, including New Orleans and Baton Rouge. The retreating Confederate army is being replaced by Red Legs, irregulars commanded by a maniacal figure, and enslaved men and women are beginning to glimpse freedom. When Hannah Laveau, an enslaved woman working on the Lufkin plantation, is accused of murder, she goes on the run with Florence Milton, an abolitionist schoolteacher, dodging the local constable and the slavecatchers that prowl the bayous.

From the introduction by Les Standiford: "The truth is that Miami, though naturally lovely, is a frontier town, perched on the border between the known and the rarely before experienced. The poet Richard Hugo once said that the natural place for the writer was on the edge, and 'edge' might well be the definitive word when it comes to this city... We are not only on the edge of the continent, we are to this country what New York was in Ellis Island's heyday, what the West Coast was in the middle of the 20th century.

Listen to what happened next in the follow-up to the best-selling The Wolf of Wall Street, now a major motion picture directed by Martin Scorsese. In the 1990s Jordan Belfort became one of the most infamous names in American finance: a brilliant, conniving stock chopper. He was the Wolf of Wall Street, whose life of greed, power and excess was so outrageous it could only be true; no-one could make this up! But the day Jordan was arrested and taken away in handcuffs was not the end of the madness. Catching the Wolf of Wall Street tells of what happened next.

In this short story from Beneath the Skin, Sam tackles another case worthy of his particular skill set.

When the US Navy send their elite, they send the SEALs. When the SEALs send their elite, they send SEAL Team Six. SEAL Team Six is a clandestine unit tasked with counterterrorism, hostage rescue and counterinsurgency. Until recently its existence was a closely guarded secret. Then ST6 took down Osama bin Laden, and the operatives within it were thrust into the global spotlight. In this internationally bestselling chronicle, former ST6 shooter Howard Wasdin takes listeners deep inside the world of Navy SEALs and Special Forces snipers.

The Incrementalists are a secret society of 200 people - an unbroken lineage reaching back 40 thousand years. They cheat death, share lives and memories, and communicate with one another across nations and time. They have an epic history, an almost magical memory, and a very modest mission: to make the world better, a little bit at a time. But now Phil, the Incrementalist whose personality has stayed stable through more incarnations than anyone else's, has been shot dead.

A fan from the moment the Doors’ first album took over KMPX, the revolutionary FM rock ’n’ roll station in San Francisco, Greil Marcus saw the band many times at the legendary Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom in 1967. Five years later it was all over. Forty years after singer Jim Morrison was found dead in Paris and the group disbanded, one could drive from here to there, changing from one FM pop station to another, and be all but guaranteed to hear two, three, four of the Doors’ songs in an hour - every hour.

Following his departure from office, Ronald Reagan moved to the margins of public interest. But like Lincoln, who was also attacked for decades after his death, Reagan deserves to be regarded as one of our greatest presidents, an exemplar of true conservative values. In this bold and philosophical reevaluation, John Patrick Diggins reveals that Reagan was a far more active and sophisticated president than we ever knew.

Roshad is a sorcerer and street thief in the great caravan city of Ular Kel. Bors is a nomadic warrior and heir to the Horse Throne. As a pair, the two are members of the mysterious Iridian Fold, an organization in which lovers seek to perfectly blend their consciousness to become an elite combat unit. But when Bors’ father forbids their union, are Bors and Roshad willing to start a war to defend their love?

Mystery sensation Pelecanos pens the lead story and edits this groundbreaking collection of stories detailing the seedy underside of the nation's capital. This is not an anthology of ill-conceived and inauthentic political thrillers. Instead, in D.C. Noir, pimps, whores, gangsters, and con-men run rampant in zones of this city that most never hear about.

Summer in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Bored and listless, 15-year-olds June and Val are looking for fun. Val wants to do something wild and a little crazy: take a raft out onto the bay. Only Val survives, washing ashore in the weeds, bruised and unconscious. This shocking event echoes through the lives of Red Hook's diverse residents. In Visitation Street, Ivy Pochoda combines intensely vivid prose with breathtaking psychological insight to explore a cast of solitary souls, pulled by family, love, betrayal, and hope, who yearn for a chance to break free.

Joey Anderson attended his great-grandmother's funeral because he expected to receive a little inheritance money. What he didn't expect was to inherit her bed-and-breakfast, provided he lives there and follows her final instructions. With a little help from his friends, Joey grows up and discovers a world beyond me, my, and I.

The Ascendant Humans have conquered Earth and banished mankind to a distant star. There, the refugees war in space over the resources rationed to them. In an orbital habitat, Commander Rylan Shaw labors against the inter-colony arms trafficking when an informant gives him horrific news. The ruthless cartel boss, Lilith, has stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. Worse, she has permission from the Wardens, humanity's robot overlords, to unleash them upon the system.

The world is in the grip of an epidemic of sleeplessness and one man will risk everything to find out what caused it. In his signature style of fast-paced action, outrageous violence, and graphically described scenes, we are tossed into a dramatic turbulence unlike anything you've ever read or heard.

In this short story from New York Times best-selling author Jonathan Maberry, a reporter accompanies a special ops team on a dangerous mission against space pirates.

Four best-selling authors. One hell-raising premise. What if the dead could be summoned from their graves - for a price? What if a quartet of distinctive storytellers took a stab at this deceptively simple idea - on a dare? The answers lie here, in Four Summoner’s Tales, as these acclaimed writers accept the challenge and rise to the occasion - in four brilliantly chilling ways. It’s all in the execution….