Showing results by narrator "Kevin Collins" in All Categories

Critical Mass is a treasure trove of sparkling, spiky prose and a fascinating portrait of our lives and cultural times over the past decades. In an age where a great deal of back scratching and softball pitching pass for criticism, James Wolcott’s fearless essays and reviews offer a bracing taste of the real critical thing.

This book contains everything you need to know to be a man. Everything. It will prepare you for every situation you can imagine, from the office to the bedroom. It will improve your life no matter what you're doing...whether you're in a bar, in a fight, in a wedding, in an argument, at a game, at work, or in a stranger's bed. It's time to be a man. Listen to this book.

Dr. Gideon Box, world-famous surgeon, is extremely good at his job. He’s never lost a patient…but he has issues. He’s antisocial. Doesn’t mix well with others. Breaks into people’s homes and assumes their identities. Occasionally kills other doctor’s patients. He’s had bad luck with women his entire life. Big surprise, right? His psychiatrist tells him to join a dating service. Tells him to seek women from small towns. Says they’ll possess basic core values, be less shallow and self-centered than the hookers and strippers he’s been dating.

It takes a certain amount of courage to step beyond one's day-to-day experiments and look at the big picture - and the origin of the Moon is a big picture question par excellence. Perhaps it makes sense that William Hartmann, one of the two scientists who unraveled the Moon's biggest mystery, is not only a scientist but also a part-time artist and science fiction writer. It took someone with an artist's eye and a fiction writer's speculative temperament to see the big picture....

James Patrick Kelly, the author of Planet of Whispers and the co-author, with John Kessel, of Freedom Beach has been nominated for both the Nebula and Hugo awards for his short fiction. This is a fable about a dissatisfied architect who travels "up-time" and changes shape to design a temple for a goddess.

In a twisted game of life and death, dominance and destruction, humanity and colonizers - outside survivors struggle to find footing and reclaim what they've lost. Mary soon discovers she is the key - but will she be able to use her deadly gifts to defeat those who have created her? 

Brought to you by Penguin. Cory Friedman was an ordinary fun-loving little boy. But one fateful March morning in 1989, the course of Cory's life changed dramatically. It started with an irresistible urge to shake his head; before long, overtaken by physical urges, tics and compulsions, his body...

Twenty years ago, Jacob lost everything. Just as he was starting to figure out life as a college freshman, his world was suddenly shattered when a devastating illness destroyed the world he once knew and claimed the lives of everyone that mattered to him. Jacob and the other survivors of the pandemic were transported to the Palace Program. As the years go by and Jacob's relationships in the Palace become more complex, he slowly begins to see that the man-made utopian society is nothing close to a perfect tomorrow.  

Epic in scope, Macrolife opens in the year 2021. The Bulero family owns one of Earth's richest corporations. As the Buleros gather for a reunion at the family mansion, an industrial accident plunges the corporation into crisis, which eventually brings the world around them to the brink of disaster. Vilified, the Buleros flee to a space colony where young Richard Bulero gradually realizes that the only hope for humanity lies in macrolife - mobile, self-reproducing space habitats.

Seventeen young adult authors across the queer spectrum have come together to create a collection of beautifully written diverse historical fiction for teens. From a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood set in war-torn 1870s Mexico featuring a transgender soldier, to two girls falling in love while mourning the death of Kurt Cobain, forbidden love in a 16th-century Spanish convent, or an asexual girl discovering her identity amid the 1970s roller-disco scene, All Out tells a diverse range of stories across cultures, time periods and identities, shedding light on an area of history often ignored or forgotten.

Thorn is back! The guilty will be punished. The war they dismissed as nonsense is now raging. Jen needs Thorn. The military want Thorn. Thorn is older and wiser, and he doesn't care what anyone wants. He has a better hold on his growing power, or so he thinks. The war calls, but there is unfinished business to attend to on the way. Unanswered questions lead in strange directions, and a war for no reason, is only part of the mystery. But through everything, Thorn carries two themes. The guilty will be punished, and there will be peace! Yesterday was just the start. 

Rick Martin loved music, and the music loved him. He could pick up a tune so quickly that it didn't matter to the Cotton Club boss that he was underage,or to the guys in the band that he was just a white kid. He started out in the slums of LA with nothing, and he ended up on top of the game in the speakeasies and nightclubs of New York. But while talent and drive are all you need to make it in music, they aren't enough to make it through a life.

Jersey Leo is the quintessential outsider - an albino of mixed race. Known as "Snowball" on the street, he makes a living as the bartender at a mob-run speakeasy in Prohibition-era Hell's Kitchen. Being neither black nor white, he has no group to call his own. His own mother abandoned him as a baby. And his father - a former boxing champ with his own secrets - disapproves of Jersey's work at a dive owned by one of New York's most notorious gangsters. So when he inadvertently purchases counterfeit moonshine ("sugar pop moon") with his boss's money - a potentially fatal mistake - he must go undercover to track down the bootlegger who took him in.

Donovan was shot by a cop. Four of the nine shots were lethal or would have been, if their target had been anybody else. The Foundation picked him up, brought him back, and trained him further. “Lethal” turns out to be a relative term when magic is involved. When Marci was 15, she levitated a paperweight and threw it at a guy she didn't like. The Foundation scooped her up for training too. “Hippie chick” Susan got well into her Foundation training before they told her about the magic, but she's as powerful as Donovan and Marci now.

All Thorn wanted was to be a Battle Mage. He had the talent, and his whole future was before him. On the day of Choosing, he finds things don't always go as planned. Suddenly Thorn's life is thrown into fast forward, and he finds himself in a world not of his own choosing. In a world of spaceships and blasters, instead of horses and swords, Thorn needs to adapt and survive, make new allies, and rediscover that although nothing is familiar, he's still a Mage, and pirates and slavers beware.

In his first nine years as a teacher, Brendan Halpin goes from wide-eyed idealist to cynical, heartbroken idealist. Unique among teaching memoirs, Losing My Faculties is not the story of a heroic teacher who transforms the lives of his hardbitten students; rather, it's the inspirational and often unpretty truth about people who choose to get up ridiculously early day after day and year after year to go stand in front of teenagers.

About this story, author James Enge says, "The principal thief in this story is me. I stole the world and characters for 'Thieves at the Gate' from Homer. It's always been interesting to me how people like Odysseus (or Gunnarr Hamundarson or whoever) could be decent, respectable guys at home and murderous pirates abroad. This isn't really the answer, but it's an answer."

FBI agent and playboy Tristan Bleu is in deep. Undercover for the last 18 months, his assignment has been handed down personally from the Director of National Intelligence. Meeting with his contacts in the darkness of a global and elite, members-only sex club, Tristan spends his time not chasing women, but the origins of a dangerous Shadow Broker - a double agent selling US weapon security codes to Russian intelligence. When Champagne magnate Renè Lebleu reaches out to him, Tristan puts his duties on hold for two days, flying to his birthplace in France to meet a man he’s never seen - a father he’s never known....

Americans are deeply divided over the Second Amendment. Some passionately assert that the Amendment protects an individual's right to own guns. Others, that it does no more than protect the right of states to maintain militias. Now, in the first and only comprehensive history of this bitter controversy, Saul Cornell proves conclusively that both sides are wrong. Cornell, a leading constitutional historian, shows that the Founders understood the right to bear arms as neither an individual nor a collective right, but as a civic right.

A magnificent history of the opening years of the Civil War by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Bruce Catton. The first book in Bruce Catton's Pulitzer Prize-winning Army of the Potomac Trilogy, Mr. Lincoln's Army is a riveting history of the early years of the Civil War, when a fledgling Union Army took its stumbling first steps under the command of the controversial general George McClellan.