Showing results by narrator "Kathe Mazur" in All Categories

In this remarkable audiobook, Anna Quindlen, one of America's favorite novelists and a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, once again gives us wisdom, opinions, insights, and reflections about current events and modern life.

In 1552, in the countryside outside Venice, the great Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio built Villa Cornaro. In 1989, Sally and Carl Gable became its bemused new owners. Called by Town & Country one of the ten most influential buildings in the world, the villa is the centerpiece of the Gables’ enchanting journey into the life of a place that transformed their own.

In a post-apocalyptic America, Jamie Teague helps a group of travelers make their way past the murderous Bushwhackers. Jamie comes to find that the strangers are Mormons headed for Utah to avoid being massacred. Knowing that they will die without his help, he agrees to take them as far as his cabin.

This story is included in Orson Scott Card's collection The Folk of the Fringe.

Twenty-nine-year-old Sophie Diehl is happy toiling away as a criminal law associate at an old line New England firm where she very much appreciates that most of her clients are behind bars. Everyone at Traynor, Hand knows she abhors face-to-face contact, but one weekend, with all the big partners away, Sophie must handle the intake interview for the daughter of the firm's most important client....

From a writer whose every book is a literary event, a superbly accomplished work of fiction. Last Night is a spellbinding collection of stories about passion–by turns fiery and subdued, destructive and redemptive, alluring and devastating. In ten powerful stories, Salter portrays men and women in their most intimate moments. A book dealer faces the truth about his life–as it is and never will be again–when he is visited unexpectedly by his brash former girlfriend.

A single day in Paris changes the lives of three Americans as they each set off to explore the city with a French tutor, learning about language, love, and loss as their lives intersect in surprising ways.

A wife struggles to make sense of her husband’s sudden disappearance. A mother mourns her teenage son through the music collection he left behind. A woman shepherds her estranged parents through her brother’s wedding and reflects on the year her family collapsed. A young man comes to grips with the joy—and vulnerability—of fatherhood. And, in the masterly opening novella, two teenagers from very different families forge a sustaining friendship, only to discover the disruptive and unsettling power of sex.

Special Agent Ana Grey (familiar to Smith's readers from North of Montana) becomes both criminal investigator and criminal when she shoots her own partner during a Santa Monica kidnappiDid ng investigation.

Comedy writer and middle daughter of Al Gore, Kristin Gore has written a funny and moving debut novel about life on Capitol Hill as seen through the eyes of Samantha Joyce, a 26-year-old health care analyst to Ohio Junior Senator Robert Gary. Hard working, idealistic, extremely competent, as well as neurotic and prone to daydreaming, Sammy, as she's known to her friends, has little time for anything, much less a relationship.

When newlywed actress Sylva Kelegian shows up at a Manhattan veterinary clinic to walk a rescue dog, a strawberry-blonde puppy stumbles down the stairs and into her heart - opening it to the plight of hurt and abandoned dogs everywhere. After a move to Los Angeles with her actor husband, Sylva finds her marriage and burgeoning career challenged by the dramas of good and evil, darkness and light, played out every day in the streets, backyards, and homes of rich and poor pet-owners alike.

From the highly praised author of Hot Plastic, a gripping, suspenseful novel about a young woman being chased by her violent past, and the flawed father forced to come to the rescue. It's been three years since Lydia Carson ran away from her privileged home in West Los Angeles. Just 17 years old, she's gotten involved with an older man who supplements his income with shady, mysterious activities. One afternoon Lydia finds herself guarding the back door of a house in Topanga Canyon during a shakedown. As murderous violence erupts, Lydia herself becomes a target.

Five years after her young husband's death, Celia Cassill has moved from one Brooklyn neighborhood to another, but she has not moved on. The owner of a small apartment building, she has chosen her tenants for their ability to respect one another's privacy. Celia believes in boundaries, solitude, that she has a right to her ghosts. She is determined to live a life at a remove from the chaos and competition of modern life. Everything changes with the arrival of a new tenant, Hope, a dazzling woman of a certain age on the run from her husband's recent betrayal.

L.A. is no place for widows. This is what 44-year-old Hannah Bernal quickly discovers after the tragic death of her handsome and loving husband, John. Misery and red-rimmed eyes are little tolerated in the land of the beautiful. But life stumbles on: Hannah's sweet three-year-old daughter, Ellie, needs to be dropped off at her overpriced preschool, while Hannah herself must get back to work in order to pay the bills on "Casa Sugar", the charming Spanish-styled bungalow they call home. Fortunately, Hannah has her "Grief Team" for emotional support....

In The Best American Erotica 2001, Marge Piercy introduces us to the nerd kid sex club, Nathan Englander explores the addictive power of a peep show, Jerry Stahl relates a dare from an extremely demanding girlfriend, and Dani Shapiro proves the difference between the fantasy and the reality of losing your virginity.

In The Best American Erotica 2002, Maggie Estep relates the surprising sexual happenings in a detox clinic, Francesca Lia Block explores the aquatic fantasies haunting a surfer, and Ernie Conrick introduces a tennis star and sex symbol who surrenders to an unusual coach. In these 23 stories you will also find cutting-edge work from other luminaries and from the Internet, where the next wave of erotica has matured into some of the most enticing writing around.

Some of the smartest erotic stories in the world just happen to be written by lesbians, women who changed the face of erotic lit. Susie Bright presents a collection of lesbian sex lives that speak fearlessly, through every taboo, without any apologies. Writers like Dorothy Allison, Lisa Montanarelli, Greta Christina, and Peggy Munson name names, get as close to any woman as they dare, and relish every deep stroke of their erotic pens….

On August 21, 1911, the unfathomable happened - Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa vanished from the Louvre. More than 24 hours passed before museum officials realized she was gone. The prime suspects were as shocking as the crime: Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, young provocateurs of a new art. As French detectives using the latest methods of criminology, including fingerprinting, tried to trace the thieves, a burgeoning international media hyped news of the heist.

Isabella d'Este, daughter of the Duke of Ferrara, born into privilege and the political and artistic turbulence of Renaissance Italy, is a stunning black-eyed blonde and a precocious lover and collector of art. Worldly and ambitious, she has never envied her less attractive sister, the spirited but naive Beatrice, until, by a quirk of fate, Beatrice is betrothed to the future Duke of Milan.

Pull down the shades and settle in for pleasure with this trio of erotic novellas - handpicked by Susie Bright - showcasing stories that are hot and masterful. Susie Bright, hailed by The New York Times as "the avatar of American erotica", is the undisputed grandmaster of the genre. Now she has handpicked three rising stars - new masters - whose stories will delight, arouse, and captivate you. Connected by a central theme - the idea that one sexual moment can change a person forever - each story is wildly different from anything you have read or heard before.

Dahlia Barr does not suffer fools - or her own government, with which she is normally at odds. Shrewd, brash, and as tough as she is beautiful, the controversial Israeli attorney specializes in defending Palestinians accused of terrorism. She is also a devoted mother, a soon-to-be-divorced wife, and the lover of a handsome American television correspondent. To Dahlia’s astonishment, the Israeli security establishment one day approaches her with a tantalizing proposition: Join us.