Showing results by narrator "Mark Owen" in All Categories

Written in seclusion following the intense negative public reaction to the publication of his novel Pierre, The Piazza Tales is Herman Melville's accessible and entertaining collection of short stories and novellas concerning love, labor, and loss. The collection includes his three most important achievements in the genre of short fiction: the short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and the novellas Benito Cereno and The Encantadas.

Sponsorship is a rich and enduring part of tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous. Twelve Step Sponsorship delivers both the theory and practice—how to do it and why—in a clear, step-by-step presentation. Written by the author of Getting Started in AA, a widely acclaimed guide for the newcomer to the program of AA, this book is the first truly comprehensive look at sponsorship, a role recovering people benefit from both as sponsees and ultimately as sponsors.

Said Sayrafiezadeh has been hailed by Philip Gourevitch as “a masterful storyteller working from deep in the American grain”. His new collection of stories are set in a contemporary America full of the kind of emotionally bruised characters familiar to fans of Denis Johnson and George Saunders. These are people contending with internal struggles - a son’s fractured relationship with his father, the death of a mother, the loss of a job, drug addiction - even as they are battered by the larger, often invisible, economic and political forces of American society.

Life can change in an instant. For Ryan and Karen Lane, it happens on the morning they discover their 12-year-old daughter’s window open, their beloved Maddie missing from her bed. Police investigate. Suspicions swirl. A teenage boy admits he was outside her bedroom window the night she disappeared. A halfway house for convicts recently opened in the neighborhood. The Lane family is thrown into turmoil, and then the detectives turn their sights on them.

Chosen for inclusion in William Evans Burton's Cyclopediae of Wit and Humor of 1857, The Lightning-Rod Man was the one Melville tale to be available throughout his lifetime, thanks to reissues of this volume. More a parable than a character-driven story, the Lightning-Rod man is a charlatan who tries to profit by selling fearful people lightning-rods during thunderstorms. The narrator has a difficult encounter with the Lightning-Rod man in this story about overcoming fear and superstition.

Will true artificial intelligences be able to appreciate or even create art? Explore dystopian societies, where AI generates most of the content and human artists must eke out an existence, and utopias where artificial minds help unlock and enhance human creativity.

In November 2020, data specialist Ken Block received a phone call from the Trump Campaign. They wanted to hire him to find evidence of election fraud. What followed were late-night and early-morning requests to assess fraud claims at a blistering pace and ultimately find definitive evidence about the role voter fraud played in the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Multiple subpoenas later, Block reveals the truth about being one of the few professionals hired to prove the Trump Campaign’s allegation that voter fraud cost Donald Trump the 2020 presidential election.