Showing results by narrator "Stephen Mendel" in All Categories

In this valedictory volume, Yale professor Harold Bloom — who for more than half a century was regarded as America's most daringly original and controversial literary critic — gives us his only book devoted entirely to the art of the novel. With his hallmark percipience, remarkable scholarship, and extraordinary devotion to sublimity, Bloom offers meditations on 48 essential works spanning the Western canon.

In one swift moment, a fall wiped away his memory. All he knew for certain was that someone wanted him dead - and that he had better learn why. But everywhere he turned there seemed to be more questions - or people too willing to hide the truth behind a smoke screen of lies. He had only the name he had been told was his own, his mysterious skill with a gun, and a link to a half million dollars’ worth of buried gold as evidence of his past life. Was the treasure his? Was he a thief? A killer? He didn’t have the answers, but he needed them soon. Because what he still didn’t know about himself, others did....

Two months after D-Day, the Allies found themselves in a stalemate in Normandy, having suffered enormous casualties attempting to push through hedgerow country. Troops were spent, and American tankers, lacking the tactics and leadership to deal with the terrain, were losing their spirit. General George Patton and the other top US commanders needed an officer who knew how to break the impasse and roll over the Germans - they needed one man with the grit and the vision to take the war all the way to the Rhine. Patton and his peers selected Maurice Rose.

Eight years a soldier, Peter Ash came home from Iraq and Afghanistan with only one souvenir: what he calls 'white static', a buzzing claustrophobia due to post-traumatic stress that has driven him to spend a year roaming the Pacific coast's mountains and forests, sleeping under the stars. But when a friend from the Marines commits suicide, Ash returns to civilisation to help the man's widow and two young children. While repairing her dilapidated porch, he makes two unwelcome discoveries.

In arguably his most personal and lasting work, America's most daringly original and controversial critic gives us brief, luminous readings of more than 80 texts by canonical authors - texts he has had by heart since childhood. 

When Peter receives a phone call at four a.m., it's the start of a dangerous whirlwind that threatens to drag him and his loved ones into its centre. The caller is Peter's closest friend, Lewis. Lewis has left his criminal past behind him, but when an associate of his goes missing from his home in upstate Wisconsin, dark secrets from their shared history may be about to come to light.

Peter Ash is wearing an armoured vest, has a pistol strapped to his leg, a semi-automatic rifle by his side, and a large stash of drugs money behind him. It's hot, the static is buzzing and he's trying not to think about what happened last week. Ash is riding shotgun in a truck leased to Heavy Metal Protection, a security firm that protects cash-rich cannabis entrepreneurs from modern-day highwaymen. Just seven days ago, Heavy Metal lost a vehicle, crew and cargo, disappearing without a trace. Armed robbery? Double homicide? Whatever, Ash is there to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Deep in north California's redwood forests, June Cassidy is hiding. She's no idea who's after her, why they want her or how much longer she can survive. But she's not the only fugitive hiding in the woods. After eight years a soldier, Peter Ash came home with only one souvenir: what he calls 'white static', a crippling claustrophobia due to post-traumatic stress that has driven him far from conventional life and deep into the wilderness, living rough, sleeping under the stars.  

A man wanted by two governments, Peter Ash has found a simple, low-profile life in Milwaukee, living with his girlfriend, June, and renovating old buildings with his friend Lewis. Staying out of trouble is the key to preserving this fragile peace...but when Peter spots a suspicious armed man walking into a crowded market, he knows he can't stand by and do nothing. Peter does interrupt a crime, but it wasn't at all what he'd expected. The young gunman appeared to have one target and one mission.

Black. As deep as night is black between the stars. Deeper than that. Night isn’t really black, but a solemn, utter shade of red. As black, then, as Tenembro Nought, which drinks all color, texture, substance from around it, giving back only its awful depth of presence.

In all of history, no organized system of thought has changed humanity as much as science. It's offspring technologies have brought unrivaled power and wealth to our lives, as well as unprecedented danger. Answers to countless questions that mystified our ancestors are now freely available to all.

The preceding little fable, cribbed from my novel, Earth, is an example of the super-short story, which some call a “drabble.” Collections have been published in the 100 and 750-word categories, but my favorite length is precisely 250.

It is, fundamentally, a question of balance. Minoru reminded himself as he left the air-flyer and set foot on the island that would be his home for many months. Keeping his stance wide and footsteps close to the ground, he moved cautiously in the insistent, heavy pull of Genji. Balance is vital when exploring a new world.

When a music mogul is found strangled to death in his apartment, there's little that would give seasoned professionals Barry Gilbert and Joe Lombardo reason to pause, but this is no ordinary murder victim. Glen Boyd, the sly music producer whom even Gilbert once threatened to kill after the man nearly destroyed his venerable marriage, seems to have a shopping list of enemies a mile long.

A man, hanging from a tree at the edge of the forest that surrounds Dockerty, Newry County, has been shot with arrows, two of which pin his belly to the tree trunk. Orwell Brennan, Dockerty’s chief of police, questions the validity of it being a hunting accident when a sergeant tells him it’s been ruled a murder. He also tells the chief that the investigation is now in the hands of Metro Homicide and outside his concern.

From Hugo- and Nebula-winning author David Brin comes this extraordinary collection of tales and essays about the near and distant future, as humans and other intelligences encounter the secrets of the cosmos - and of their own existence. What happens when an urban archaeologist discovers a terrible secret under the landfills of Los Angeles? Will there still be a purpose for "biologicals" when cybernetic humans become mighty and smart? Come explore these and another dozen startling and provocative tomorrows with a modern master of science fiction.

It all began when my publisher sent me out on what used to be called a Chautauqua circuit—public seminars and panels and rubber-chicken dinners—to promote my books. That’s when I began noticing something very strange about the way people have started thinking these days.

It annoyed Io’s best friend to give birth to a four-kilo cylinder of tightly wound, medium grade, placental solvent filters. For five long months Perseph had kept to a diet free of sugar, sniff, or tobac—well, almost free. The final ten weeks she’d spent waddling around in the Bedouin drapery fashion decreed for pieceworkers this year. And all that for maybe two thousand dollars’ worth of industrial sieves little better than a fabricow might produce!

Physicians swear a Hippocratic Oath whose central vow is “Do no harm.” I wonder—how many other professions might do well to set that goal above all others?

Since the days of Olaf Stapledon, science fiction has been attracted to cosmic themes. The three stories in this section are about the shape, nature and fate of the universe...or universes...reflecting recent concepts which would have been thought scientifically absurd only a decade ago.