Showing results by narrator "Christopher Lane" in All Categories

After the success of This Side of Paradise, it was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s popular short fiction that helped maintain the luxury and celebrity to which he and his wife, Zelda, had grown accustomed. Reflections of that blithe and glittering lifestyle, these eleven stories reveal a man both beguiled by and critical of the American postwar generation he defined. Fitzgerald’s tales capture the inauguration of the age in all its hysteria, revelry, and tragedy - the same world he would later revisit in his renowned The Great Gatsby.

Celebrated for more than fifty years as a world-renowned novelist, essayist, and political figure and commentator, Gore Vidal is less known for the exquisitely crafted short fiction he wrote as a young man. Like the work of Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, his stories have been overshadowed by the author’s triumphs writing in other genres. Still, Vidal’s short fiction offers us a portrait of the young artist in the 1940s and 1950s. His subtle and comic tales often center on adolescence and homosexual themes.

Billy Todd has always been different. Most people called him odd, and those were the nice people. Though he was born with a learning disability, Billy's parents never allowed him to consider himself disabled. Raised to be self-sufficient, Billy might not be as smart as some, but he was a lot smarter than people realized.

Raised in the small town of Clyde, Massachusetts, Charles Gray has worked long and hard to become a vice president at the privately owned Stuyvesant Bank in Manhattan. But at the most crucial moment of his career, when his focus should be on reading his boss's intentions and competing with his chief rival for promotion, Charles finds himself hopelessly distracted by the past.

In space, mutiny means death - that’s why Inspector General Park Yerim is taking her investigation so seriously. The alleged mutineer is Captain Nicolau Aames, whose command of the massive Earth-Mars vessel Aldrin has come under fire. The vast System Initiative says he disobeyed orders, but his crew swears he’s in the right. En route to Mars, Park gathers testimony from the Aldrin’s diverse crew, painting a complex picture of Aames’s character: his heroism, his failures, even his personal passions.

Why are the New Zealand All Blacks the best rugby team in the world? How does the Kirov Ballet produce generation after generation of exceptional ballerinas? How did Southwest Airlines evolve from being an idiosyncratic Texan airline to become one of the most successful businesses internationally? How does the Finnish School Education System deliver great results by breaking conventions? Powerhouse uncovers the performance secrets of some of the most impressive organizations around the world and reveals the key principles they have in common....

Never meddle with unidentified spying objects...The year is: The Future. Mars and Earth are like that divorced couple who don’t exactly like each other but have at least stopped fighting in public. Floating somewhere in between them, amid all the garbage and Gene Roddenberry’s ashes, a transport vessel called the SS Jefferson is homeward bound. Its crew might have even made it on time for once, too...

The cult members keep to themselves, but the suspicious circumstances under which they arrived have Gabriel Du Pre questioning their motives and seeking answers. He soon learns from a friend in the FBI that seven of the cult's recently defected members were killed, each shot to death, but no arrests have been made. Then another shooting occurs at the perimeter of the ranch, and Du Pre finds himself blindly searching for a killer, an explanation for the murders, and the identity of the cult's elusive leader.

Junior exec Ben thought working for a prestigious bank in Hong Kong would be a career-building adventure and an exotic change from his staid Long Island upbringing. In the complex splendor of Hong Kong, he finds himself in a position of extreme privilege - a position in which everything is seen as a commodity. When he and his colleagues take an outing on the South China Sea to escape the city smog, a sordid secret is revealed.

From dark and humble beginnings, a master musician rises to take the world by storm. Nick Raze, a violin virtuoso, exists at the height of popularity, while his life remains a well-protected mystery. A year of artist-in-residency in Chicago introduces him to a man who offers him his first friendship and a woman who offers him his first taste of love. Now Nick must make a choice to fight against the bonds of his past in order to escape the isolation of his heart.

In this series of essays, Roger Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion and an art critic for the London Spectator, examines the current art scene with a scathing intelligence and a crystalline eloquence of writing style. Particularly amusing are his dissections of art-show catalogspeak.

Before he was the engaging professor who brought mythology into people’s living rooms through his conversations with Bill Moyers, before he became known as the thinker whose ideas influenced Star Wars, and before his now-beloved phrase “follow your bliss” entered the popular lexicon, Joseph Campbell was a young man who tried his hand at writing fiction. After years of Depression-era unemployment, when he lived off money he had earned playing saxophone and read the world’s great literature in a syllabus of his own design, Campbell published his first short story.

When homicide detective Jolie Burke awakens to intruders in the dark of night, she's forced to flee. Jolie's nobody's victim, but she cannot fight this faceless enemy alone. She reaches out to Cyril Landry, the ex-Navy SEAL who is long on special-ops skills and short on patience. He suffers no fools - ever. But when Landry rolls into Branch, New Mexico, Jolie is gone, and there's nothing waiting for him but trouble.

When he mysteriously finds himself drawn into a world of his own devising, writer Rod Everlar is confronted by a shocking truth: he has lost control of his creation to a brooding cabal of evil. In order to save his creation - and himself - he must seize control of Falconfar and halt the spread of corruption before it's too late.

Dark Lord is the first epic installment in The Falconfar Saga, from best-selling author Ed Greenwood.

Prospecting was a lonely business for Tappan, but his burro Jenet was good company, and more. She knew the trails and waterholes better than Tappan, from the scorching heat and poison air of Death Valley to the blinding blizzards of Arizona's mountains. Jenet tracked with him, faithfully, as his only friend. And he repaid her loyalty with a final, supreme effort of heart, will, and spirit.

One of the most dynamic eras in American history, the 1920s began with a watershed year that would set the tone for the century to follow. The Roaring Twenties is the only decade in American history with a widely applied nickname, and our collective fascination with this era continues. But how did this surge of innovation and cultural milestones emerge out of the ashes of World War I?

In the dead of night, Lieutenant Kent "Rat" Ratham and his secret Special Forces counterterrorism team parachute into the Sudanese desert, where an arms merchant is delivering weapons to Wahamad Duar, the world's most wanted terrorist. Eventually Duar is captured. But an enemy within Rat's own government sells him out - a cold-blooded act of betrayal that could lead to horrifying destruction for the United States, for Duar's organization is planning a major strike.

From the station-houses to the joy-houses, they knew about Mike Carmody. He was the best cop money could buy. And when the Syndicate boys said jump, Carmody knew just how high. But they couldn't buy Carmody's kid brother Eddie. And when Eddie turned against them, the Mob snuffed him out like a nickel cigar.

Cyril Landry has been a dead man since he escaped a firefight off the coast of Florida three years ago. In all that time, the former Navy SEAL has been living off the grid to protect his wife and teenage daughter, who have mourned him and moved on.

Ben Riller is the most successful producer on Broadway, but his newest production is in danger of closing before it opens. In his stressed-out condition, Ben is hearing the voice of his long-dead father, and they're having a running argument about life, love, and other people's money.