Risultati letto da "T. Ryder Smith" in Tutte le categorie

Why do we embalm the deceased? Why are funerals so expensive? Is there a reason coffins are shaped the way they are? Where does the tradition of viewing the body come from? Ceremonies for honoring the deceased are crucial parts of our lives, but few people know where our traditional practices come from—and what they reveal about our history, culture, and beliefs about death. In Last Rites, author Todd Harra takes listeners on a fascinating exploration of American funeral customs—exploring where they came from, what they mean, and how they are still evolving.

Captain Pausert just can’t catch a break! First, he became the mortal enemy of his fiancée, his home planet, the Empire - and even the Worm World, the darkest threat to mankind in all of space. All because he helped rescue three slave children from their masters. Of course, these three young women were the universally feared Witches of Karres - but how was he to know that?! And after he defeated the Worm World (with the help of the witches, of course), the Empress herself had sent him on a secret mission to stop a nanite plague that was raging across the galaxy.

Sonny and Clara Myers struggle on their Kansas farm in the late 1930s, a time the Lord gave up on: their land's gone dry, barren, and worthless; the bankers are greedy and hungry, trying to squeeze them and other farmers out of their homes; and, on top of that, their marriage is in trouble. The couple can struggle or surrender and hightail it to California like most of the others. Sonny refuses to abandon the family farm, so Clara takes off westward in their old battered truck. Alone on the farm and determined to get back Clara and the good old days, Sonny comes up with an idea....

A girl walks home from school. She's tall for her age. She's wearing her winter coat. Her headphones are in. She's hurrying. She never makes it home. In the aftermath, while law enforcement tries to justify the response, one fact remains: A police officer has shot and killed an unarmed 13-year-old girl. The community is thrown into upheaval, leading to unrest, a growing movement to protest the senseless taking of black lives, and the arrival of white supremacist counter-demonstrators.

Days ago, Belisarius pulled off the most audacious con job in history. He's rich, he's back with the love of his life, and best of all, he has the Time Gates, arguably the most valuable things in existence. Nothing could spoil this...except the utter destruction of his people and the world they lived on. To save them, he has to make a new deal with the boss he just double-crossed, to travel back in time and work his quantum magic once again, tracking down the source of the wormholes.

In The Bible Salesman, Preston Clearwater is scoring cash working a car-theft ring in post-World War II North Carolina. When he picks up 19-year-old Bible salesman Henry Dampier, Preston convinces the kid that he's an FBI spy. And before Henry knows what's up, he finds himself in way over his head with no apparent way out.

Well known for his short stories, critically acclaimed author Ron Carlson has been featured in the New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, and Best American Short Stories. Carlson has also won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, a National Society of Arts and Letters Literature Award, and the 1993 Ploughshares Cohen Prize. Here he captivates audiences with a compelling novel no listener will soon forget.

With several acclaimed novels under her belt, Nanci Kincaid is praised for her raw, edgy Southern tales. Leaving their sleepy Mississippi home behind, brother and sister Truely and Courtney Noonan head west. There they drift apart, only to reunite, as they lay down new roots in Southern California.

Joel Dunn Jr. tells the story of how he did everything he could to save his family after his mother left and his father's tenuous hold on sanity unraveled. On a journey from the town of Trent, North Carolina, to the coast, Joel and his little brother Tank thread their way back to their mother, fueled by potato chips, Coke, and the soundtrack of the powerful soul music that their daddy taught them to love.

The Convict and Other Stories is a superb collection of stories set in and around the American Deep South and its charismatic people.

Billy Edgewater is a harbinger of doom. Estranged from his family, discharged from the navy and touched by a rising desperation, he sets out hitchhiking home to East Tennessee, where his father is slowly dying. On the road, separately, are Sudy and Bradshaw, brother and sister, and a one-armed con man named Roosterfish. All, in one way or another, have their pasts and futures embroiled with D. L. Harkness, a predator in all the ways there are.

This collection of 11 stories spans virtually the whole of Tolstoy's creative life. While each is unique in form, as a group they are representative of his style, and touch on the central themes that surface in War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Stories as different as "The Snowstorm", "Lucerne", "The Diary of a Madman", and "The Devil" are grounded in autobiographical experience. They deal with journeys of self-discovery and the moral and religious thought that characterizes Tolstoy's works of criticism and philosophy.

In a forgotten corner of western Kentucky lies a haunted forest referred to locally as "The Deadening", where vampire cults roam wild and time is immaterial. Our protagonist and his accomplice - the one and only Carver Canute - set out down the Old Spur Line in search of the legendary Kudzu House, where an old couple is purported to have been swallowed whole by a hungry vine.

David Binder is a young, successful writer living in Chicago and suffering from writer's block. He stares at the blank page, and the blank page stares back - until inspiration strikes in the form of a ghost story that captivated him as a child. With his pregnant wife and young daughter in tow, he sets out to explore the myth of Virginia Beale, Faery Queen of the Haunted Dell.

Dazzling, paranoid literary sci-fi for fans of Blake Crouch and Philip K. Dick: Vin, a down-on-his-luck young tech entrepreneur forced out of the software company he started, takes a job house-sitting an ultra-modern Seattle mansion whose owner has gone missing. There he discovers a secret basement lab with an array of computers and three large, smooth caskets. Inside one he finds a woman in a state of suspended animation. When Vin decides to climb into one of the caskets to see what happens, his reality begins to unravel....

In 1937, there are recesses in Appalachia no outsiders have ever explored. Two government-sponsored documentarians from Cincinnati, Ohio - a writer and photographer - are dispatched to penetrate this wilderness and record what they find for President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. For photographer Clay Havens, the assignment is his last chance to reboot his flagging career. So when he and his journalist partner are warned away from the remote Spooklight Holler outside of town, they set off eagerly in search of a headline story.

There is no precedent in postwar American history for the destruction of the town of Paradise, California. On November 8, 2018, the community of 27,000 people was swallowed by the ferocious Camp Fire, which razed virtually every home and killed at least 85 people. Fire in Paradise is a dramatic and moving narrative of the disaster based on hundreds of in-depth interviews with residents, firefighters and police, and scientific experts.

If he’d known he was getting stuck with a pair of psi-wielding super-beings, even straitlaced do-gooder Captain Pausert might have thought twice about rescuing his two young “witch” charges from slavery on a dark planet. But what’s done is done - and with galactic peace once again threatened in the mysterious and pirate-ridden Chaladoor region, only a dangerous mission backward in time can save the present and - maybe - get stalwart-but-obtuse Pausert to see one of these young “witches” as more than just a friend.

Jack Kerouac’s archive is vast. Throughout his life he was constantly writing, and he meticulously saved and catalogued his material. The result is that beyond the work published in his lifetime there has been a rich stream of posthumous writing that is far from tapped. This collection of previously unpublished writing culled from the Kerouac archive, and as a companion to Paul Maher Jr.'s Becoming Kerouac, spans Kerouac’s adult life, from a journal written at age seventeen to autobiographical reflections a few years before his death.

Cent and Torres have been trapped with evil before but this isn’t quite the same thing. Stuck on Harold Campbell’s island with nowhere to go and surrounded by a growing number of obayifo, they will have to find allies if they want to make it out. But not everyone can be trusted, and even those you think you can trust have ulterior motives. As the long night drags on, and with morning—and the promise of safety—still hours away, shadowy forces make their move, further complicating Cent and Torres’s plans.