Showing results by narrator "William Dufris" in All Categories

It’s been four and a half years since my friends and I revolutionized the world with our Brainocyte technology. I have a beautiful wife, a genius son, and more money than I know what to do with. My current problem? Not everyone appreciates the brave new world we've built. With enemies where I can least expect them, our life-saving technology could turn out to be the end of everything...even humanity itself.

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.

Tom Sawyer does not like school. He does not like work, and he never wants to get out of bed in the morning. But he likes swimming and fishing, and having adventures with his friends. And he has a lot of adventures. One night, he and his friend Huck Finn go to the graveyard to look for ghosts.They don’t see any ghosts that night. They see something worse than a ghost – much, much worse.

Nine brilliantly told and connected stories take place in a post-apocalyptic world sometime in the near future and follow the narrator at different stages of his life, trying to survive in a savage landscape of climate change, plague, larceny, and a new sexual order.

In 1928, the boy who will discover Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh, is on the family farm, grinding a lens for his own telescope under the immense Kansas sky. In Flagstaff, Arizona, the staff of Lowell Observatory is about to resume the late Percival Lowell's interrupted search for Planet X. Meanwhile, the immensely rich heir to a chemical fortune has decided to go west to hunt for dinosaurs, and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the most beautiful girl in America is going slowly insane.

A Dog’s Promise is the heartwarming and uplifting story about one dog who fulfils his promise and helps a family who needs him the most. The dog who thinks of himself as ‘Bailey’ knows one thing for sure: all dogs go to heaven after they have fulfilled their purpose on earth. But Bailey’s work on earth is far from finished; there are still so many more humans that need a dog’s talent for unconditional love. There is one family in particular that needs Bailey’s help, a family that is on the verge of breaking apart.

Karl Taro Greenfeld knew from an early age that his little brother, Noah, was not like other children. He was unable to communicate verbally or tie his shoes, and despite his angelic demeanor was prone to violent outbursts. No doctor, social worker, or specialist could pinpoint what was wrong with Noah beyond a general diagnosis: autism. The boys' parents dedicated their lives to caring for their younger son? A challenging, often painful experience that their father detailed in a bestselling trilogy of books.

Late one night in August 1934, following a yearlong spree of bank robberies across the Midwest, Jason and Whit Fireson are forced into a police shootout and die for the first time. Now it appears that the bank robbers known as the Firefly Brothers by an admiring public have at last met their end in a hail of bullets.

First published in 1920, Flappers and Philosophers marked F. Scott Fitzgerald's entry into the realm of the short story, in which he adroitly proved himself "a master of the mechanism of short story technique" ( Boston Transcript).

We have released the genie from the bottle: climate change is coming, and there's no stopping it. The question, according to Matthew Kahn, is not how were going to avoid a hotter future but how were going to adapt to it. In Climatopolis, Kahn, one of the worlds foremost experts on the economics of the environment, argues that cities and regions will adapt to rising temperatures over time, slowly transforming our everyday lives.

The American literary tradition has, in a far shorter span of time than others throughout history, achieved a glowing and glittering reputation. From its transatlantic roots it has absorbed the sons and daughters of other cultures, other lands and made them part of her own. Within this melting pot of styles, genres and wordplay one fact stands out: In the American short story, literary tradition has a strong, vibrant and almost inclusive history, if you know where to look.

Andre de Laurent is the second son of an extremely wealthy family, which basically means he'll always be number two. That is, until his mother's uncle dies and leaves him a multi-billion-dollar fortune. So what's the trouble? Andre has 60 days to take a wife, and he'll have to remain married for one year or forfeit the inheritance to distant relatives - who are hell-bent on claiming the inheritance as their own.

Who wants to live in a house, wear clean clothes, be good, and go to school every day? Not young Huckleberry Finn, that’s for sure.So Huck runs away, and is soon floating down the great Mississippi River on a raft. With him is Jim, a black slave who is also running away. But life is not always easy for the two friends. And there’s 300 dollars waiting for anyone who catches poor Jim.

One of every seven people in the United States can trace their family back to Brooklyn, New York - all 71 square miles of it, home to millions of people from every corner of the globe over the last 150 years. Now Peter Golenbock, the author of the acclaimed book Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers, returns to Kings County to collect the firsthand stories of the life and times of the people of Brooklyn - and how they changed the world.

Of all the sports played across the globe, none has more curses, superstitions, or supernatural events like baseball, America's national pastime. While some of these can easily be explained, there are just as many that cannot. Field of Fantasies delves right into that superstition with short stories written by several key authors about baseball and the supernatural.

When men find gold in the frozen north of Canada, they need dogs – big, strong dogs to pull the sledges on the long journeys to and from the gold mines. Buck is stolen from his home in the south and sold as a sledge-dog. He has to learn a new way of life – how to work in harness, how to stay alive in the ice and the snow... and how to fight. Because when a dog falls down in a fight, he never gets up again.

Warlock Marcus Shifter has been sent on the most dangerous mission of his career: travel to the remote Minotaur nation and convince them not to abandon the tenuous peace agreement between the humans and the paranormals. But securing that peace requires his best friend, Steve the Minotaur, to help him find a way into the isolated homeland. A homeland Steve left behind long ago, intending to bury his complicated past.

Oggie Cooder's charving has already taken him to the top of the world. (Charving, in case you don't know, involves chewing and carving pieces of cheese.) But there's one place Oggie Cooder has never been allowed to go: Donnica Perfecto's pool.

A thrilling adventure set in a peculiar world, a fantastical 18th century, where a young woman must uncover the secrets of her past while confronting the present dangers of a magical wilderness. When Tom Orange rescues a mysterious young woman from a flooded river, he senses that their fates will deeply intertwine. At first she claims to remember nothing, and rumor animates Root - an isolated settlement deep in a strange wilderness.

Former U.S. Army Special Forces soldier Jack Pilgrim has it all - big bucks, a successful security business with plush government contracts, a beautiful wife. Then Pilgrim's partner, Merc Conrad, goes missing in Afghanistan with a chunk of government cash and most of the company's assets. The CIA threatens to throw Pilgrim in jail if he doesn't find Merc and return the money.