Showing results by narrator "Richard Powers" in All Categories

Bobby Clark is just 16 when he drops out of school to follow his big brother, Jim, into the jewelry business. Bobby idolizes Jim and is in awe of Jim's girlfriend, Lisa, the best saleswoman at the Fort Worth Deluxe Diamond Exchange. What follows is the story of a young man's education in two of the oldest human passions, love and money

At stake in 1896 was the new idea that some landscapes should be collectively, permanently owned by a democratic government. Although many people today think of public lands as an American birthright, their very existence was then in doubt and dependent on a merger of the talents of these two men. Natural Rivals examines a time of environmental threat and political dysfunction not unlike our own and reveals the complex dynamic that gave birth to America’s rich public lands legacy.

The Triumph of the Egg is a fictional panorama of a great region of our country, unfolded by a writer who - to quote the New York Times - "depicts life in the Midwest as Dostoevsky pictured the many colored life of Russia, with almost as wonderful a touch of genius, with a more concentrated and daring skill." This coveted 1921 collection is an example of what a book of stories can be when a writer of vision deals with the materials of American life.

Harms' Way takes us into the chilling world of a supermax detention facility where America's most psychotic killers are kept in solitary confinement. Yet as we get to know Ethan and explore this world through his wry humor and tragic sense of destiny, we find ourselves uncomfortably at home.

Violet Heller, his desperate mother, is joined by Ali Lateef, a missing persons specialist, in a desperate attempt to locate her son before psychosis claims him completely. As the stakes grow higher, Lateef gradually comes to realize that this is more than a case of a runaway teen: Will Heller has a chilling case history, and Violet - beautiful and enigmatic - harbors a secret that Lateef will discover at his own peril.

Someone is about to make a killing in the music industry. Why would songwriting legend Gideon Pike disappear just as his 30-year career turns a multimillion-dollar profit Music columnist Mick Sever goes looking for his missing friend Gideon in the gritty backrooms of Miami's nightclubs, dodging suicide speedboats and running from sniper fire. What surfaces is how the major players in the music industry are not making the headlines, but just pulling the strings that create them.

Bobby Eckstrum is known around the town of Columbia as a drunk. In a surprising turn of events, he is thought to have murdered and robbed Roger Simms, a local rancher. A posse is organized, and they hunt down and kill the man they believe to be Bobby. But Destiny Eckstrum, Bobby's daughter, believes they did not kill her father, but rather his equally shiftless brother who is said to live elsewhere in Colorado.

A young woman is found strangled, dressed in Victorian finery as if for high tea, in Mingo House, a morbid brownstone and museum, a 19th-century time capsule in Boston’s Back Bay. Dubbed the “Victorian Girl” by the media everywhere, she becomes the eye of a hurricane of publicity and speculation and of a darkness reaching back to the Mingo family’s roots in England and to the builders of the mansion, a Civil War arms dealer and his séance-holding wife.

What makes a penguin a bird? Is a camel more closely related to a horse than to a giraffe? Why is a whale not a fish? Similar puzzles preoccupied Charles Darwin throughout his life. Whimsy, in the playfulness of stories for children, is a way to appreciate Darwinian histories. In Do Elephants Have Knees? Charles R. Ault Jr. uses the fanciful imagery of story to explain Darwinian thought. At the same time, he launches careful consideration of Darwin's humanity, the origins of his curiosity, and his ideas.

Near Cape Cod, Provincetown, with a gay resort, an art colony, and a working fishing port, has long been a place of freedom, escape, diversity, and risk. Mark Winslow, a Boston comic, arrives with his troupe of actors, ready to break into the Provincetown club circuit. But the town and the region are far from peaceful this summer.

A dramatic, ambitious first novel of a Midwestern family's self-destruction and repair.

Theodore Mead Fegley has always been the smartest person he knows. By age 12 he was in high school, and by 15 he was attending a top-ranking university. And now, at the tender age of 18, he's on the verge of proving the Riemann Hypothesis, a mathematical equation that has mystified academics for almost 150 years. But only days before graduation, Mead suddenly packs his bags and flees home to rural Illinois.

Rock-and-roll journalist Mick Sever is back with a new assignment: interview music legend Danny Murtz. One of the most successful producers in history, Murtz has walls lined with platinum records - and a closet full of skeletons. But before Mick can hop a plane to the island paradise where Murtz has secluded himself after his latest "incident" (Murtz's romantic conquests have a way of vanishing into thin air), he's nearly run down by a speeding car. Coincidence?

Tom Fairchild is struggling to make it as a graphic artist, but his probation officer thinks he belongs in jail. Then millionaire Stuart Barlowe offers him $50,000 to travel to Italy with his daughter Allison, a map expert, to duplicate a rare Renaissance map. But Tom soon suspects that Barlowe wants a forgery, not a duplicate. When people start turning up dead, and Tom and Allison realize they are being tailed, it quickly becomes clear that they have no one to trust but each other.

Nathan Nelson is just above average in everything he does. However, his father, a renowned physicist, pursuing his quest to uncover his son's latent gifts, sends Nathan to whiz-kid summer camps. By the time Nathan is 17, hopes for a late-blooming prodigy seem dashed. But then a tragic accident and ensuing coma leave Nathan with an altered mind that allows him to memorize vast amounts of information.

Our wars were behind us. Mankind was moving out from the planet of its birth. New worlds were settled, and with the wealth of the galaxy at hand, poverty was eliminated. Then, out of a clear summer sky, came the first berserker attack. This collection of short stories continues the ongoing saga of the berserker wars with “The Machinery of Lies”, “Masque of the Red Shift”, “In the Temple of Mars”, “Brother Berserker”, and “Smasher.”

At once intimate and sweeping, Bottomland - the anticipated second novel from Michelle Hoover - follows the Hess family in the years after World War I as they attempt to rid themselves of the anti-German sentiment that left a stain on their name. But when the youngest two daughters vanish in the middle of the night, the family must piece together what happened while struggling to maintain their life on the unforgiving Iowa plains.

Before George Lucas's Death Star, before Star Trek's Doomsday Machine, came the Berserkers, intelligent, space-faring killing machines whose sole purpose is to destroy all life. The Berserkers have developed a new trick: Berserker units that can pass for human-created androids. They're gambling on the advantage this gives them and massing for an all-out attack on human-held space.

Actor and award-winning travel writer Andrew McCarthy's featured story recounts his quest to uncover his family's Irish history while 25 other prominent writers tell their own heartfelt stories of connection. Spanning the globe, these stories offer personal takes on journeying home, whether the authors are actively seeking long-lost relatives, meeting up with seldom-seen family members, or perhaps just visiting the old country to get a feel for their roots.

Pastor Sheldon Long was born of the woods, raised in a secluded cabin by a mute mother and an abusive father who preached God's vengeance. Forced to take control of his own destiny, Pastor Long found God in his own way, melded with the mythologies of his mother's tribe. Now he's out to send the wicked, as he has judged them, to heaven. Steven, Pastor Long's son, is pining for his former babysitter and crushing on nearly every girl he goes to school with. Soon his preoccupation with the opposite sex lures him into investigating a string of drownings that police are declaring accidents.