Showing results by narrator "Roxanne Hernandez" in All Categories

One hundred years before Ender's Game, the aliens arrived on Earth with fire and death. Earth Afire by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston is the story of the First Formic War. Victor Delgado beat the alien ship to Earth, but just barely. Not soon enough to convince skeptical governments that there was a threat. They didn’t believe that until space stations and ships and colonies went up in sudden flame. And when that happened, only Mazer Rackham and the Mobile Operations Police could move fast enough to meet the threat.

In Beyond Magenta, six teens tell what it is like for them to be members of the transgender community. "I’ve always loved my body, and now I love it even more because it fits how I feel." - Jessy "Learn your pronouns because I don’t want to have to slap somebody tonight." - Christina “Transition? Everyone goes through one kind of transition or another. We go through transitions every day. Except mine is maybe a little more extreme." - Mariah

Nearly 100 years before the events of Orson Scott Card’s best-selling novel Ender’s Game, humans were just beginning to step off Earth and out into the Solar System. A thin web of ships in both asteroid belts; a few stations; a corporate settlement on Luna. No one had seen any sign of other space-faring races; everyone expected that First Contact, if it came, would happen in the future, in the empty reaches between the stars. Then a young navigator on a distant mining ship saw something moving too fast, heading directly for our sun.

In this unabridged audio of Take Four, the final book in the Above the Line Series by New York Times best-selling author Karen Kingsbury, filmmakers Keith Ellison and Dayne Matthews finally ink a deal with the nation's top young actor. But the actor takes a public fall that threatens his reputation. Now the producers must act as missionaries to save the film, their families, and the young movie star.

The mining ship El Cavador is far out from Earth, in the deeps of the Kuiper Belt, beyond Pluto. Other mining ships, and the families that live on them, are few and far between this far out. So when El Cavador’s telescopes pick up a fast-moving object coming in-system, it’s hard to know what to make of it. It’s massive and moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light.

El Cavador has other problems. Their systems are old and failing. The family is getting too big for the ship. There are claim-jumping corporate ships bringing Asteroid Belt tactics to the Kuiper Belt.

When Brittany Ellis walks into chemistry class on the first day of senior year, she has no clue that her carefully created perfect life is about to unravel before her eyes. She's forced to be lab partners with Alex Fuentes, a gang member from the other side of town, and he is about to threaten everything she's worked so hard for her flawless reputation, her relationship with her boyfriend, and the secret that her home life is anything but perfect.

Famine. Death. War. Pestilence. These are the harbingers of the biblical apocalypse, of the end of the world. In science fiction the end is triggered by less figurative means: nuclear holocaust, biological warfare/pandemic, ecological disaster, or cosmological cataclysm.

From Dan Wells, author of the New York Times best-selling Partials Sequence, comes the first book in a new sci-fi-noir series. Los Angeles in 2050 is a city of open doors, as long as you have the right connections. That connection is a djinni - a smart device implanted right in a person's head. In a world where virtually everyone is online 24 hours a day, this connection is like oxygen - and a world like that presents plenty of opportunities for someone who knows how to manipulate it.

Brad Cutler, 28, is a rising star at his New York ad agency, about to marry the girl of his dreams. Anyone would agree he has it all - a great career, a beautiful and loving fiancée, and a fairy tale life ahead of him - when memories of a high school girlfriend begin to torment him. Lost innocence and one very difficult choice flood his conscience, and he is no longer sure what the future will bring except for this: he must find his old love and make amends.

Holden Harris is an 18-year-old locked in a prison of autism. He is bullied at school by kids who only see that he is very different. Ella Reynolds is part of the 'in' crowd. A cheerleader and star of the high-school drama production, her life seems perfect. Ella Reynolds is part of the 'in' crowd. A cheerleader and star of the high school drama production, her life seems perfect. When she catches Holden listening to her rehearse for the school play, she is drawn to him....

Written with compassionate realism and wit, the stories in this mesmerizing collection depict the disparities of town and village life in South America, of the frightfully poor and outrageously rich, of memories and illusions, and of lost opportunities and present joys. Stories include "No One Writes to the Colonel", "Tuesday Siesta", "One of These Days", "There Are No Thieves in This Town", "Balthazar's Marvelous Afternoon", "Montiel's Widow", "One Day After Saturday", "Artificial Roses", and "Big Mama's Funeral".

Luis Fuentes has always been sheltered from the gang violence that nearly destroyed his brothers' lives. But that didn't stop him from taking risks - whether he's scaling a mountain in the Rockies or dreaming of a future as an astronaut, Luis can't stop looking for the next thrill.

Carlos Fuentes doesn't want any part of the life his older brother, Alex, has laid out for him in Boulder, Colorado. He wants to keep living on the edge, and carve his own path - just like Alex did. Unfortunately, his ties to a Mexican gang aren't easy to break, and he soon finds himself being set up by a drug lord. When Alex arranges for Carlos to live with his former professor and his family to keep him from being sent to jail, Carlos feels completely out of place.

A young mother in Mexico City, captive to a past that both overwhelms and liberates her, and a house she cannot abandon or fully occupy, writes a novel of her days as a translator living in New York. A young translator, adrift in Harlem, is desperate to translate and publish the works of Gilberto Owen, an obscure Mexican poet who lived in Harlem during the 1920s and whose ghostly presence haunts her in the city's subways. And Gilberto Owen, dying in Philadelphia in the 1950s, convinced he is slowly disappearing, recalls his heyday decades before.

The third book in the Above the Line series follows filmmakers Chase Ryan and Keith Ellison as they celebrate their first successful movie. But in the midst of family relationships, broken budgets, and conflicting dreams, Chase and Keith must find their way through the maze of pain and questions that comes with everything they thought they wanted.

For 32 years archaeologist Julius Gabriel investigated the Mayan calendar, a 2,500-year-old enigma of time and space that predicts humanity will perish on December 21, 2012 (the winter solstice). Julius believes that certain mysterious sites represent pieces of a global puzzle linked to the salvation of our species. Ridiculed by his peers, Julius dies before he can solve the doomsday prophecy. Now only one person can prevent our annihilation: Julius' son, Michael, a patient locked up in a Miami mental asylum.

Too long to be a short story, too short to be a novel - welcome to the surprisingly potent world of the novelette. The award-winning magazine Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show has been an online haven for this powerful form of storytelling since 2005. Now its editors have selected their all-time favorite science fiction novelettes from the magazine's eight-year history and reprinted them together in one big book of listening pleasure.

Two unknown producers struggle to fulfill their dreams to change lives through the power of film. With millions of investors' dollars on the line, everything starts to fall apart and they realize they may be in over their heads. Is it possible to beat the odds and make a movie unlike anything ever done before? Or will they lose everything in the process?

The second book in the Above the Line series finds independent filmmakers Chase Ryan and Keith Ellison at the center of Hollywood wheeling and dealing. The two friends discover that all that glitters is not gold and that success in Tinsel Town could cost them everythingtheir relationships as well as their ideals.

Magazine journalist McKenna Jordan is chasing the story of an unidentified woman who heroically pulled a teenage boy from the subway tracks. When McKenna locates a video snippet that purportedly captures the incident, McKenna is shocked to discover that the woman in the video bears a strong resemblance to Susan Hauptmann, a close friend who vanished without a trace 10 years earlier. What might have been a short-lived Metro story sends the former-prosecutor-turned-reporter on a twisting search to dark secrets buried dangerously close to home....