Showing results by narrator "Thom Rivera" in All Categories

The House of the Spirits brings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family. The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife, Clara, a woman with a mystical connection to the spirit world. When their daughter, Blanca, embarks on a forbidden love affair in defiance of her implacable father, the result is an unexpected gift to Esteban.

Winner, The Man Booker Prize, 2015 Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters - assassins, journalists, drug dealers, and even ghosts - A Brief History of Seven Killings is the fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time and its bloody aftermath, from the streets and slums of Kingston in the 1970s, to the crack wars in 1980s New York, to a radically altered Jamaica in the 1990s.

Josh Duffy is staring into the abyss. A decorated army veteran turned military contractor, his last mission went sideways, leaving him badly injured and his career derailed. Now, he’s working as a mall cop, trying to keep his family one step ahead of the bill collectors. So when a chance at redemption - and a big pay day - comes his way, Duff eagerly jumps in. The job - to ride shotgun on a motorcade of heavily armed and armored vehicles as they roll into Mexico’s cartel country. 

The Lost Recordings is an audio documentary about Nueva Canción, a musical movement that emerged across Latin America in the 1960s and '70s. The genre became an essential means of artistic expression and social resistance to the many dictatorships and oppressive regimes of the time.

On Friday noon, July the 20th, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below. With this celebrated sentence, one of the towering achievements in American fiction, and a novel read throughout the world, begins. By fate or chance, a monk has witnessed the collapse. Brother Juniper, moved by the tragedy, embarks on a quest to prove a higher order is at work in the deaths of those who perished. His search leads readers on a timeless investigation into the nature of love and the meaning of the human condition.

Nine-year-old Magdala and her father have been exiled from their home; they flee through the harsh landscape of the American West, searching for refuge. As violence pursues them, they join a handful of survivors on a pilgrimage to the holy city of Las Vegas, where it is said that vigilante saints reside, bright with neon power.

As the leader of the moon's newest "dragon", Adriana has wrested control of the moon's helium-3 industry from the Mackenzie Metal Corporation and fought to earn her family's new status. Now, at the twilight of her life, Adriana finds her corporation, Corta Helio, surrounded by the many enemies she made during her meteoric rise. If the Corta family is to survive, Adriana's five children must defend their mother's empire from her many enemies - and each other.

A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers, and bad Christians.

When he first meets Najwa at a lecture by Siri Hustvedt—whom he’s never read—our hero discovers a whole new world of feminist thought. Determined to impress her, he sets out sincerely on his journey to allyship. His mother confides in him about the dreams she had to sacrifice because of the patriarchy, and he laments the violence and oppression women face. But he can’t help but notice that they’re going about their activism the wrong way.

The tight-knit Izquierdo family is grappling with misfortunes none of them can explain. Their beloved patriarch has suffered from an emotional collapse and is dying; eldest son Gonzalo’s marriage is falling apart as he tries to care for his father; daughter Dina, beleaguered by fear that her nightmares are real, is a shut-in. When Gonzalo digs up a strange object in the backyard of the family home, the Izquierdos take it as proof that a jealous neighbor has cursed them―could this be the reason for all their troubles? 

In Nebula Award-winning author Sam J. Miller’s devastating debut short-fiction collection—featuring an introduction by Amal El-Mohtar—queer infatuation, inevitable heartbreak, and brutal revenge seamlessly intertwine. Whether innocent, guilty, or not even human, the boys, beasts, and men roaming through Miller’s gorgeously crafted worlds can destroy listeners, yet leave them wanting more. 

It's 2004 in Muriga, a quiet town in Spain's northern Basque Country, a place with more secrets than inhabitants. Five years have passed since the kidnapping and murder of a young local politician - a family man and father - and the town's rhythms have almost returned to normal. But in the aftermath of the Atocha train bombings in Madrid, an act of terrorism that rocked the nation and the world, the townspeople want a reckoning of Muriga's own troubled past.

In this vivid and compelling novel, Tim Murphy follows a diverse set of characters whose fates intertwine in an iconic building in Manhattan's East Village, the Christodora. The Christodora is home to Milly and Jared, a privileged young couple with artistic ambitions. Their neighbor, Hector, a Puerto Rican gay man who was once a celebrated AIDS activist but is now a lonely addict, becomes connected to Milly and Jared's lives in ways none of them can anticipate.

Oscar winning writer-director Guillermo del Toro and bestselling author Cornelia Funke have come together to transform del Toro’s hit movie Pan’s Labyrinth into an epic and dark fantasy novel for listeners of all ages, with enchanting short stories that flesh out the folklore of this fascinating world. 

The Interior Circuit is Goldman's story of his emergence from grief five years after his wife's death, symbolized by his attempt to overcome his fear of driving in the city. Embracing the DF (Mexico City) as his home, Goldman explores and celebrates the city, which stands defiantly apart from so many of the social ills and violence wracking Mexico. This is the chronicle of an awakening, both personal and political, "interior" and "exterior", to the meaning and responsibilities of home.

Father Solomon Lancaster—the town's dry-witted sheriff and priest at the community Catholic church—finds himself on the forefront of an investigation into a series of murders. Soon, he's fighting to match wits with the serial killer terrorizing his town while trying to justify his law-enforcement credentials to the FBI as their analysts and profilers take Crooked Creek, Indiana, by storm. But Father Solomon is hiding secrets of his own. Ones that threaten to rise to the surface as the murders continue and the investigation draws nearer to the truth. 

A deathbed confession revolving around Opus Dei and Pinochet, By Night in Chile pours out the self-justifying dark memories of the Jesuit priest Father Urrutia. By Night in Chile's single night-long rant provides a terrifying, clandestine view of the strange bedfellows of church and state in Chile. This wild, eerily compact novel - Roberto Bolaño's first work available in English - recounts the tale of a poor boy who wanted to be a poet but ends up a half-hearted Jesuit priest and conservative literary critic, a sort of lapdog to the rich and powerful cultural elite.

One summer evening in 1916 in Blanchester, Ohio, a sixteen-year-old farm boy was riding his horse past the town cemetery. The horse reared back and whinnied, and Eugene Exman saw God. For the rest of his life, he struggled to recreate that moment. Through a treasure of personal letters and papers, God, the Bestseller explores Exman’s personal quest. A journey that would lead him in the late 1920s to the Harper religious books department, which he turned during the Great Depression into a money-making juggernaut and the country’s top religion publisher.

“One of Mexico’s greatest living writers,” wrote Jonathan Lethem in 2018, “we are just barely beginning to catch up to what she has to offer.” In the years since, Rivera Garza’s work has received widespread recognition: she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant for fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Yet we have still only started to discover the full range of a writer who is at once an incisive voice on migration, borders, and violence against women, as well as a high stylist in the manner of Lispector or Duras.

Beginning with a novella by Spider-Man's co-creator Stan Lee and veteran Marvel writer Peter David retelling the wall-crawler's origin, this exciting anthology has original stories featuring one of the world's most enduring heroes.