Showing results by publisher "Tantor Media" in United States

There's a reason Emmeline Frothingham left her hometown of Creek Water, Missouri, as soon as humanly possible. That reason is small-minded, judgmental people. After graduating from college, Emmie gets her dream job in New York City. As the head buyer at Silver Spoons - a high-end boutique - and single girl about town, her life is ideal. That is, until the night of The Event, her company's annual awards ball at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Facing the repercussions of her wild night, Emmie is forced to go home to work in her family's business.

Stephen King has received enormous attention from both the popular press as well as academics seeking to explain the unique phenomenon of his success. Books on King explore his canon in religious contexts, in political and historical contexts, in mythic contexts, in Gothic/horror contexts, and in a wide variety of other contexts appropriate to a writer who has become "America's Storyteller.

In Too Good to Be Altogether Lost, Wilder expert Pamela Smith Hill dives back into the Little House books, closely examining Wilder's text, her characters, and their stories. Hill reveals that these gritty, emotionally complex novels depict a realistic coming of age for a girl in the American West. This realism in Wilder's novels, once perceived as a fatal flaw, can lead to essential discussions not only about the past but about the present—and the underlying racism young people encounter when reading today.

Best known as the author of Moby Dick (1851), Herman Melville is one of America's greatest writers. His achievements range from popular novels and experimental fiction to powerful poetry. His works are tragic and funny, impassioned and ironic, obsessed with philosophical seeking and attuned to the details of everyday life.

With lively writing and illuminating examples, David Caplan argues that two characteristics mark the vast, contentious literature. On the one hand, several of America's major poets and critics claim that America needs a poetry equal to the country's distinctiveness. They advocate for novelty and for a break with what is perceived to be outmoded and foreign.

Rei Shimura, a California girl living in Tokyo, has an antiques business that's only slightly more successful than her love life. When her aunt enrolls her in the Kayama School of Ikebana to learn how to arrange flowers, disaster strikes. A mean teacher is found with scissors in her neck, and Takeo Kayama, the sexy billionaire heir to the school, considers Rei's aunt the main suspect.

Tara moves to the American South three years after her arranged marriage to tech executive Sanjay. Ignored and lonely, Tara finds herself regressing back to childhood memories that have scarred her for life. When she was eight, her parents had left her behind with her aging grandparents and a schizophrenic uncle in Mangalore, while taking her baby brother with them to make a new life for the family in Dubai. Tara's memories of abandonment and isolation mirror her present life of loneliness and escalating abuse at the hands of her husband.

How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks—and answers. Taking us on a tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras.

On a brisk February morning while walking to work, Ruth Foster is stopped by the local sheriff. He insists she accompany him to a health clinic, threatening to arrest her if she doesn't undergo testing in order to preserve decency and prevent the spread of sexual disease. Though Ruth has never shared more than a kiss with a man, by day's end she is one of dozens of women held at the State Industrial Farm Colony for Women. Some are there because they were reported for promiscuity by neighbors, husbands, strangers. Some were accused of prostitution.

In modern-day Tokyo, Robin Swann's life has sputtered to a stop. She's stuck in a dead-end job testing antiquities for an auction house, but her true love is poetry, not pottery. Her stalled dissertation sits on her laptop, unopened in months, and she has no one to confide in but her goldfish. On the other side of town, Nori Okuda sells rice bowls and tea cups to Tokyo restaurants, as her family has done for generations. But with her grandmother in the hospital, the family business is foundering. Nori knows if her luck doesn't change soon, she'll lose what little she has left.

First published in 1956, No-No Boy was virtually ignored by a public eager to put World War II and the Japanese internment behind them. No-No Boy tells the story of Ichiro Yamada, a fictional version of the real-life "no-no boys". Yamada answered "no" twice in a compulsory government questionnaire as to whether he would serve in the armed forces and swear loyalty to the United States. Unwilling to pledge himself to the country that interned him and his family, Ichiro earns two years in prison and the hostility of his family and community when he returns home to Seattle.

Sadie Sabatini thinks of herself as a modern-day Robin Hood who uses her gift as a skilled con artist to help those who have nowhere else to turn. Leading this life is rewarding, but the number of enemies are piling up. Sadie decides to lay low and start over with a new (and legitimate business) in the small town of Wilson, Texas, situated on a small peninsula in beautiful Lake Amore. Trouble is never far behind though and her past catches up to her in a big way when a friend of a former mark threatens blackmail for his silence.

A Curse of Blood and Bone is the heart-pounding second installment in the Ozero Curse series that will leave listeners breathless. Nicolette Elzie weaves together themes of female empowerment, love, lust, and grief with masterful precision, creating a story that will grip listeners from the very start.

Nix Zaldanna was never meant to fall in love. As the infamous Nightshade of Rojas, she was trained to kill, to obey, to serve. But when she is captured and left to rot in the dungeons of the enemy king, she waits for the Empress to come for her.

With Tripas, Brandon Som follows up his award-winning debut with a book of poems built out of a multicultural, multigenerational childhood home, in which he celebrates his Chicana grandmother, who worked nights on the assembly line at Motorola, and his Chinese American father and grandparents, who ran the family corner store.

In the autumn of 1928, herbalist and healer Callie Beecham makes a living treating patients with plant-based medicines and therapies in her small South Carolina town. When a young man urgently knocks on her door one morning, Callie finds her world turned upside down. He begs Callie to come to the freed-slave settlement of Liberia, nestled against the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, to save his wife, struggling in childbirth. On the back of a mule, Callie follows the man to Liberia and discovers a world previously unknown to her.

Six years ago, one fight ended it all . . . And now Tracey Walker has bittersweet memories and a secret that she keeps close to her heart. A fresh start in a new town is just what she and her five-year-old son need to move on from the past. But when she discovers her old flame lives a few doors down from her, she's confronted with the urge to tell him everything.

This dark story, set in medieval Austria, hinges on unearthly and hidden mental powers. It also gives an insight to the author's psyche during his final days.

The other stories in this edition include "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg", "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County", "The Story of the Bad Little Boy", "The Diary of Adam and Eve", "Edward Mills and George Benton", "The Joke That Made Ed's Fortune", and "A Fable".

Benjamin Alire Sáenz's stories reveal how all borders—real, imagined, sexual, human, the line between dark and light, addict and straight—entangle those who live on either side. Take, for instance, the Kentucky Club on Avenida Juárez two blocks south of the Rio Grande. It's a touchstone for each of Sáenz's stories. His characters walk by, they might go in for a drink or to score, or they might just stay there for a while and let their story be told. Sáenz knows that the Kentucky Club, like special watering holes in all cities, is the contrary to borders.