Showing results by narrator "Kevin Kenerly" in All Categories

The sadistic Empress Porcia rules over a shattering empire. Risen from misty forests, a barbarian horde sweeps toward her capital. Across the southern sea, her brother builds an armada to slay her. In the cold north, young Princess Valentina seeks allies to destroy the Empire and rebuild the Republic. As the noose tightens around Porcia's neck, the empress musters her armies, willing to burn the world to protect her throne.

It is easy to be depressed if you live in a neighborhood that has few supportive resources available or is marred by gun violence. We are able to diagnose people with depression, but how does one heal a neighborhood? This City Is Killing Me brings policy and psychology together. Through case studies, Jonathan Foiles opens up his therapy door to allow us to overhear the stories of individual poor Chicagoans. Through statistics and the example of Chicago, he teaches us how policy decisions have contributed to these individuals’ suffering.

For players, fans, managers, and executives, Jackie Robinson remains baseball’s singular figure, the person who most profoundly extended, and continues to extend, the reach of the game. Beyond Ruth. Beyond Clemente. Beyond Aaron. Beyond the heroes of today. Now, a half-century since Robinson’s death, letters come to his widow, Rachel, by the score. But Robinson’s impact extended far beyond baseball: he opened the door for Black Americans to participate in other sports, and was a national figure who spoke and wrote eloquently about inequality.

Danae is not only herself. She is concealing a connection to a grieving collective inside of her body. But while she labors as a tech servant in the dangerous underwater enclave of Bloom City, her fractured self cannot mend. In a desperate escape, Danae and her lover, Naoto, hire the enigmatic ex-mercenary Alexei to guide them out of the imploding city. But for Danae to reunify, the three new fugitives will have to flee across the otherworldly beauty of the post-apocalyptic Southwest.

To Charles Fort, with Love is award-winning fantasist Caitlín R. Kiernan’s third collection of short fiction, a haunting parade of the terrible things which may lie beyond the boundaries of science, the minds which may exist beyond psychology, and the forbidden places which will never be located in any orthodox globe. A deceptively even dozen, this collection includes Kiernan’s celebrated stories “Onion” and “Andromeda Among the Stones”, as well as a number of more obscure pieces.

This collection of 22 short stories by the author of Daughter of Hounds and Alabaster firmly established Caitlín R. Kiernan as one of the preeminent voices in dark fantasy today. Through a cycle of interconnected narratives, Kiernan unflinchingly explores a surreal world where the fantastic and the mundane are never separated by more than the insubstantial thickness of a shadow.

In his Locus review of Two Worlds and in Between - the first volume of The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan - Gary K. Wolfe wrote, “...it makes you wish the second volume were here now.” Well, the long wait is over. This second volume completes this ambitious undertaking, collecting the finest of Kiernan’s stories from 2004 to 2012, selected by the author herself. The book includes 25 short stories and one poem, plus the short novel Black Helicopters - more than 200,000 words of fiction, including the World Fantasy Award-winning “The Prayer of 90 Cats”.

On February 22, 1855, the Elizabeth Jennings v. Third Avenue Rail Road case was settled: The jury stunned the courtroom with a $250 verdict in Lizzie’s favor. Future president Chester A. Arthur was Jennings’ attorney, and their lives would be forever intertwined. This is the story of what happened that day. It’s also the story of Jennings and Arthur’s families, the struggle for equality, and race relations. It’s the history of America at its most despicable and exhilarating. Yet few historians know of Elizabeth Jennings or her impact on desegregating public transit.

In this collection of true, quirky history, Steve Silverman provides fascinating tales to astonish and entertain. Covering a wide variety of topics, these stories that have been lost to history highlight the quirks, complexities, and curious nature of our species.

Willie Black knew he had a father, even if he didn't know where he was buried. It wasn't like Artie Lee gave his son anything but his genes. He died when Willie was 15 months old, and Artie and Peggy never married. They couldn't have, in the segregated commonwealth of Virginia in 1960. Then, in January of 2018, Artie Lee, dead almost 57 years, reinserts himself into his son's life. Philomena Slade calls Willie, the mixed-race night-cops reporter for the local daily rag, to her death bed to ask him a favor he can't refuse: Keep Artie's grave clean.

Zohar, an ancient land of sand and splendor, rallies for its last stand. The genocidal Aelarian Empire sends its legions to destroy the small desert kingdom. King Epher and his band of rebels stand against a fire they cannot extinguish. And it is Claudia herself, once Epher's paramour, who leads the legions tasked with killing him. Across the sea, in the Empire's capital, a cruel new emperor has seized power. Atalia Sela, once the leader of a barbarian horde, now fights in the arena as a gladiator. Ofeer Sela, once a concubine and now a rebel, seeks to free her sister.

Evelyn is a Creole woman who comes of age in New Orleans at the height of World War II. Her family inhabits the upper echelon of black society, and when she falls for no-name Renard, she is forced to choose between her life of privilege and the man she loves. In 1982, Evelyn's daughter Jackie is a frazzled single mother grappling with her absent husband's drug addiction. Just as she comes to terms with his abandoning the family, he returns, ready to resume their old life.

As a DEA agent caught in an unwinnable drug war, Abel has spent his life with the ugliest side of humanity. It’s no wonder he’s given in to corruption, bribery, and an illegal side-hustle that has him on the run from some of the most dangerous men in South America. Then he stumbles on a deadly, abandoned alien girl who has made a home under the green canopy of the deepest part of the jungle. Her space craft crash-landed a decade ago; his life crashed and burned well before that.

In this ambitious novel, Phillips creates a dazzling kaleidoscope of historical fiction, one that illuminates the dark legacy of Europe’s obsession with race and blood. At the center of The Nature of Blood is a young woman, a Nazi death camp survivor, devastated by the loss of everyone she loves. Her story is interwoven with a cast of characters from both the present and past: her uncle Stephan, Othello the Moorish general, three Jews in 15th century Venice, and an Ethiopian Jew struggling for acceptance in contemporary Israel.

Seventeenth-century northern Nigeria. A royal messenger has died under suspicious circumstances. Tasked with investigating the death, a Durbar warrior and his young apprentice must endure trials of loyalty, betrayal, and sacrifice to solve the mystery and prevent the bitter rivalry between two kingdoms from descending into a bloody war.

Having won his emancipation after fighting on the side of the colonies during the American Revolution, Salem Hawley is a free man. Only a handful of years after the end of British rule, Hawley finds himself drawn into a new war unlike anything he has ever seen. New York City is on the cusp of a new revolution as the science of medicine advances, but procuring bodies for study is still illegal. Bands of resurrectionists are stealing corpses from New York cemeteries, and women of the night are disappearing from the streets, only to meet grisly ends elsewhere.

For rock-and-roll writer Mick Sever, another story, another deadly island paradise is all in a day’s work. This time, Mick heads to Nassau, Bahamas, home of the legendary Highland Studio. Known for pumping out hits that burn up the charts, Highland is where the magic happens - or rather, where the magic happened until a devastating fire destroyed the entire studio. No one knows how the fire started, who started it - or whose body was found among the charred ruins.

Quincannon’s pursuit of two con men who have absconded to Hawaii with a considerable sum of his employer’s assets dovetails nicely with Sabina’s vision of a second honeymoon. But neither is wont to stay out of trouble, and Sabina inadvertently becomes involved in a locked room/dying message murder in Honolulu.

What exactly is the difference between a love letter and a suicide note? Is there really any difference at all? These might be the questions posed by Dear Sweet Filthy World, Caitlin R. Kiernan’s 14th collection of short fiction, comprising 28 uncollected and impossible-to-find stories. Here are 28 tales of apocalypse and rebirth, of miraculous transformation and utter annihilation. Here is the place where professing your undying devotion might be precisely the same thing as signing your own death warrant or worse.

In Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Ammonite Violin & Others, one of contemporary dark fantasy’s most bewitching and distinctive voices is back with another banquet of the weird and unexpected. Within this book, you’ll discover a dazzling suite of stories situated on the borderlands between the unspeakable and the erotic, the grotesque and the sublime.