Showing results by narrator "Jennifer van Dyck" in All Categories

"I intend to do everything...I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it too, for it is everywhere! I shall involve myself wholly...everything matters!" This first selection from Susan Sontag's diaries (from 1947-1963) takes us from early adolescence through to when Sontag was in her early 30s. It is an astonishingly affecting and honest self-portrait which is also a fascinating, revealing account of an artist and critic being born. We see Sontag honing her skills and fashioning herself, by a supreme act of will, into an intellectual force.

The only thing August Pfeiffer hates more than algebra is living in a vampire town. Located at a nexus of mystical energy fields, Fulton Heights is practically an electromagnet for supernatural drama. And when a mysterious (and annoyingly hot) vampire boy arrives with a cryptic warning, Auggie suddenly finds himself at the center of it. An ancient and terrible power is returning to the earthly realm, and somehow Auggie seems to be the only one who can stop it.

Winner of the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction They tell Jip he tumbled off the back of a wagon when he was small, and no one ever came back for him. He never had a reason to question this tale--but then a stranger shows up and begins asking about him around town. Who is this man, and...

In a book that begins with a series of lynchings and ends with a series of apologies, Eula Biss explores race in America. Her response to the topic is informed by the experiences chronicled in these essays - teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting for an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and settling in Chicago’s most diverse neighborhood.

Inseparable since childhood, Jack and Gin Rathbone inhabit a world of privilege and eccentricity into which no strangers are permitted. Until, that is, Jack falls passionately in love with Vera Savage: a flamboyant and reckless artist over ten years his senior. When they flee to New York City within weeks of meeting, Gin is forced to witness their relationship unfold from a bruised, bereft distance.

Again and again, Molly Antopol’s deeply sympathetic characters struggle for footing in an uncertain world, hounded by forces beyond their control. Their voices are intimate and powerful and they resonate with searing beauty. Antopol is a superb young talent, and The UnAmericans will long be remembered for its wit, humanity, and heart.

Pittsburgh has recently (and more than once) been called the most livable city in America; yet the old image of smoky skies and steel mills spewing forth grit has never quite disappeared. Its history as a dirty industrial center is a part of its residents, a part of their toughness. The people of the steel city fight.

Perfect strangers whose once-perfect lives were cruelly shattered, they're bound by a long-lost child, a fragile strand of newfound maternal hope and mutual loneliness. Yet Elsa and Marin are never truly alone. Someone is always nearby, watching them and their children. Someone driven by vengeance and the simple poetry of nursery rhymes.

With unflagging courage, wit, and eloquence, Darcy shares what she calls her "fast-forward" life, a life in which she applies for disability, leaves her job, and plans her own funeral as well as meets and moves in with her true love, buys a house, and gives birth to her first child in less time than it takes most of us to accomplish even one of these things.

It remains without question the most memorable and memorized speech in American history. On November 19, 1863, in 272 words delivered among the freshly dug graves of Union dead upon the country's bloodiest battlefield, Abraham Lincoln redefined American liberty and forever altered the course of...

As a young recruit, brilliant engineer Nadim Crowe accidentally destroys an entire Scrapheap full of ships. Now, decades later, he ends up on the crew of the Renegat, the only ship in the Fleet ever sent on a mission backward to investigate an ancient Scrapheap. Something invaded that Scrapheap, and the Fleet wants to know what. Or who. The Renegat: The only ship the Fleet dares risk. The Renegat: A ship of misfits and screw-ups sent on an impossible mission. All alone in deep space.

The answers Captain Jonathan "Coop" Cooper and the crew of the Ivoire seek lie in the Boneyards. But an encounter from Coop's recent past shows up to haunt him, an encounter he never told Boss about, an encounter that could threaten her future, his life, and the fragile peace between the Alliance and the Empire.

A Newbery Honor Book. Greta had always loved the fog—the soft gray mist that rolled in from the sea and drifted over the village. The fog seemed to have a secret to tell her. Then one day when Greta was walking in the woods and the mist was closing in, she saw the dark outline of a stone house...

Aidan, the Wolf of Awe, has abandoned the Brotherhood and forsaken his vows. Feared by all and trusted by none, he hunts alone, seeking vengeance against the evil that destroyed his son. He has not saved an Innocent in 66 years - until he hears Brianna Rose's scream of terror across centuries, and leaps to modern-day Manhattan to rescue her....

A classic summer vacation thriller from the most popular storyteller of our time. A mother and her three children struggle to survive on the most shocking sailing trip of their lives. Since the death of her husband, Anne Dunne and her three children have struggled in every way. In a last-ditch...

In a lovely suburban town just north of New York City, the gossip mill runs more efficiently than the commuter-train line. And in every impeccably decorated house, they're talking about Lauren Walsh. They say that nothing could be worse than being abandoned by your husband for another woman. They're wrong.

The most civilized and 'decent' among us find that we are complicit with the most brutal murderers. We enter into literally unspeakable alliances - of which we dare not speak except through the obliquities and indirections of fiction, poetry, and visual art of the sort gathered here in New Jersey Noir.

Serena has the job she's always dreamed of and Chase, the man her heart never dared to. As a new editor at Vogue, she bags the biggest interview of the year with Yvette Renault, the infamous former editor of French Vogue, in The Carlton-InterContinental Hotel during the Cannes Film Festival. She eagerly jets off to France while Chase stays home, working with her father, a former senator, on his upcoming mayoral campaign.

A CIA agent’s two-year-old child was stolen in the night as a brutal act of vengeance. Nine years later, Catherine Ling’s instincts - maternal and professional - tell her that her son is still alive, but she needs the help of someone as driven and obsessed as she is to find him - and that person is Eve Duncan. Eve has walked this same path and shares Catherine’s nightmare, having endured the disappearance of her own daughter, Bonnie.

Brand-new stories from David Housewright, Steve Thayer, Judith Guest, Mary Logue, Bruce Rubenstein, K.J. Erickson, William Kent Krueger, Ellen Hart, Brad Zellar, Mary Sharratt, Pete Hautman, Larry Millett, Quinton Skinner, Gary Bush, and Chris Everheart.