Showing results by narrator "Stefan Rudnicki" in All Categories

At a funeral of an old friend, Matt Helm takes a trip down memory lane and sparks a romance that he thought was safely locked in the past. But with old feelings resurfacing, other things Helm thought were buried are coming back to haunt him - a small-time hood in Mexico, a dirty drug deal, and a string of women that lead him into dangerous territory.

The setting for this historical romance is the French and Indian War, a war which pitted England and its American colonists against the French and their Indian allies. Cora and Alice Munro, the daughters of an English commander, are on their way to join their father. Escorting them through the wilderness are Alice's fiancé, Major Duncan Heyward, and the treacherous Indian Magua, who secretly serves the French.

This is the epic sea adventure, a harrowing tale of slavery and revolt aboard a Spanish ship, is often regarded as Melville's finest short story. The balance of forces is complete, the atmosphere one of epic significance, the light cast upon the hero intense to the highest degree, the realization of the human soul profound, and the telling of the story orchestrated like a great symphony.

A Mystery Writers of America “Grand Master” - author of the gangster classic Road to Perdition, longtime Dick Tracy writer, and multiple Shamus Award winner - teams with an acclaimed rising young historian in this riveting, myth-shattering dual portrait of Al Capone, America’s most notorious gangster, and Eliot Ness, the legendary Prohibition agent whose extraordinary investigative work crippled his organization.

Accompanied by his faithful minidrag Pip and a most troublesome alien called Abalamahalamatandra - Ab for short - Flinx set out for Alaspin, the ruggedly primitive homeworld of his flying snake.There he hoped to find the giant man with the gold earring who somehow held the key to Flinx's mysterious past and to the strange powers he possessed. Chasing down his heritage was trouble enough, but Flinx didn't know what real trouble was until he realized that a deadly assassin squad was three steps behind him.

When war broke out on the planet Harmony, the Oversoul of that colonized world selected the family of Wetchik to carry it back to long-lost Earth. Now the tribe is ready at last to take a ship to the stars. But from the beginning there has been bitter dispute between Wetchik's sons, Nafai and Elemak. On board the starship Basilica, the children of the tribe will become pawns in the struggle for control of reclaimed Earth.

Perhaps the most notorious American murderer of the 20th century, Charles Manson's legacy extends far beyond his horrific crimes. As the wild-eyed, swastika-tattooed, nightmarishly charismatic leader of the Manson Family, he was convicted of the brutal killings of nine people in 1971, including the Tate-LaBianca murders of seven in Los Angeles over two hot August nights in 1969.

Spanning four decades in the mid-19th century, the interconnected novellas of Old New York lay out in vivid detail the complex and inscrutable codes, customs, and taboos of New York society in classic Wharton style.

Like most children, Penrod gets caught up in his own elaborate lies with hilarious results. His friends and his dog accompany him on his many jaunts, from the stage as "the Child Sir Lancelot", to the playground, to school. They make names for themselves as "bad boys" who, fittingly, always have the most fun. This humorous, thoughtful story is a wonderful example of the real-life characterization and attention to detail for which Tarkington is celebrated.

Despite Mercury's desolateness, there are still those who hope to find diamonds in the rough. Saito Yamagata thinks Mercury's position will make it an ideal orbit point for satellites that could someday create enough power to propel starships into deep space.

Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude", an imaginary crime that defies definition.

Even now, after more than 15 years, it is hard to see the invasion of Iraq through the cool, considered gaze of history. For too many people, the damage is still too palpable, and still unfolding. Most of the major players in that decision are still with us, and few of them are not haunted by it, in one way or another. Perhaps it's that combination, the passage of the years and the still unresolved trauma, that explains why so many protagonists opened up so fully for the first time to Robert Draper.

If you think the only thing Ellison writes is speculative fiction, craziness about giant cockroaches that attack Detroit, or invaders from space who look like pink eggplant and smell like chicken soup, this dynamite novel of the emergent days of rock and roll will turn you around at least three times. No spaceships, no robots, just a nice kid from Louisville named Stag Preston with a voice like an angel, seductive moves like the devil, and an invisible monkey named Success riding him straight to hell.

A rising star in the weightless combat sport of zeroboxing, Carr "the Raptor" Luka dreams of winning the championship title. Recognizing his talent, the Zero Gravity Fighting Association assigns Risha, an ambitious and beautiful Martian colonist, to be his brandhelm - a personal marketing strategist. It isn't long before she's made Carr into a popular celebrity and stolen his heart along the way.

In Rip-Off!, 13 of today’s best and most honored writers of speculative fiction face a challenge even they would be hard-pressed to conceive: Pick your favorite opening line from a classic piece of fiction (or even non-fiction) - then use it as the first sentence of an entirely original short story.

Dr. Victor Frankenstein, an ambitious young scientist, is consumed by a fanatic desire to create a living being. He fashions an eight-foot-tall creature and succeeds in animating him, but, horrified by his visage, perceives his creation to be a monster and frightens him away. The monster, wandering in search of human companionship, is spurned and repulsed by all he approaches and learns to hate and to kill.

Terraform hones the predictive capacity of science fiction and seeks new, vivid, and visceral ways to depict the future we’re hurtling toward, translating the decay and anxiety that surround us into something else, something unexpected, something that burns like a beacon and upends the conventional ideas of where we’ll end up next. Section by section—Watch/Worlds/Burn—the book takes on surveillance, artificial intelligence, and climate collapse. With a potent roster of established names and rising talents, it confronts the issues that orbit our everyday existence.

This novel centers on the figure of Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, a member of the dying class of the landed gentry, who spends most of his time lying in bed gazing at life in an apathetic daze, encouraged by his equally lazy servant Zakhar and routinely swindled by his acquaintances. But this torpid existence comes to an end when, spurred on by his crumbling finances, the love of a woman, and the reproaches of his friend, the hardworking Schtoltz, Oblomov finds that he must engage with the real world and face up to his commitments.

Seven years after the indomitable Doug Stavenger has realized his cherished dream of establishing a colony on the inhospitable lunar surface, Moonbase is a thriving community, a marvel of scientific achievement created and supported by nanotechnology: virus-sized machines that can build, cure, and destroy. But nanotechnology has been declared illegal by the home planet’s leaders, and a powerful despot is determined to lay claim to Stavenger’s peaceful city - or obliterate it, if necessary.

Six years after the first manned Martian expedition, a second has been announced, this one motivated purely by its profitable potential. Half-Navajo geologist Jamie Waterman, a veteran of the first mission, feels his conflicted soul beckoning him back to the eerie, unforgiving planet. As commander of the new exploratory team, he will have to contend with a bitter and destructive rivalry, a disturbing new emotional attraction, and deadly, incomprehensible "accidents" that appear to be sabotage.