Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Urban

A chance encounter on a train leads painter Christine Ward to wonder whether Orin Pierce, her beloved college friend, believed dead for two decades, may actually be alive. As she begins to track down the man she believes he might be, she finds herself in the grip of a troubling past she thought she had come to terms with. In her search through the tangles of truth and illusion, memory and dream, she questions her roles as lover, mother, artist, and mourner of the dead.

Faithless is a work of experimental fiction weaving through various scenes and memories of being in love, out of love, and abused by love as told and experienced by Grace, a troubled 20-something-year-old struggling with her identity as a bisexual Korean-American. Everything is recounted as experienced - in fragments.

For the better part of thirty-seven years, Frank Bruce has hobbled through his life, dragging his hunger for amphetamines, alcohol, and crime behind him like a heap of tarnished weight. Now, emboldened by the love of his child-fiancé Maddie Nicole, Frank turns his back on all his addictions and runs away from New Mexico hoping for a second chance. Trapped by his crooked past, but determined to protect everything he loves, Frank looks for help from his onetime mentor, drug kingpin and murderer Jon Santer.

Epi Dalmau is a desperate man. Early one morning, he carries a duffle bag into a dingy bar in a rough neighborhood of Barcelona. Four other people are in the bar: his brother Alex, his good friend Tanveer, the bartender, and a Pakistani man who wandered in to use the restroom. Epi grabs a hammer out of his duffle bag and attacks Tanveer. After a brief struggle and a couple of blows, Tanveer lies dead on the floor and Epi flees the bar. Alex and the bartender plan to find and protect Epi, while blaming the murder on the unfortunate Pakistani man, who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Being a teenage literary prodigy is hard. Richard Goodman may have a book contract at 17, but his parents don’t respect his opinions, he can’t lose his virginity, and his ego inflates and deflates with every breath. Even when Richard receives the attention he craves, he finds that fame and fortune can’t deliver him from his own flaws. The Work Is Innocent is Yglesias’s fictional take on his own freakishly precocious literary coming-out as a teen.

Rafael Yglesias completed this novel, his first, at the age of sixteen. The largely autobiographical story follows a New York prep school dropout yearning for freedom and authenticity. On its release the book was hailed as a next-generation Catcher in the Rye. But protagonist Raul Sabas comes of age in a very different New York than Holden Caulfield - a tumultuous and radicalized city following the student takeover of Columbia University and assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

To Billy, who used to show in the hot new galleries in the East Village of the 80s and early 90s, his downhill progression is what he calls "the vague decline." But life feels exquisitely transformed by his new daily yoga practice ("a little hothouse sanctuary in the big city") clearing the way; creating insight, flexibility, clarity; breathing; sweating; variations of vulnerability, arched open emotion. Billy is also enraptured by his new yoga crush. Soon he and Amanda, a yoga teacher (her "poses are pure," "flexible and solid," "gliding easily in her element"), are in love and are caught up in the newness and wonder of their happiness.

At the International Classical Guitar Competition in Montreal, top-flight musicians fly in from all over the world to compete in a gruelling week. A career can be made or lost here, and the slightest mishap - a lapse of memory, a shaking right hand, a broken fingernail - can ruin years of preparation. Judges and contestants alike battle and scheme to achieve what they most desire here. There is much more than pretty music being performed on this stage.

Growing up in Brooklyn, Samantha Bonti knew the writer's life she was meant to live waited across the bridge in Manhattan. Summoning the courage to break free from an abusive mobster boyfriend, Sam finally leaves Bensonhurst and begins her new life, working as a temp in a Wall Street brokerage firm. Quickly, she's swept off her feet by Wall Street player Alec DeMarco, a man of boundless energy, appetites, desires, and the wealth to indulge it all.

Perfectly evoking the sights and sounds of the summer of 1978 in Brooklyn, Suzanne Corso makes an acclaimed fiction debut with this powerful coming-of-age tale, told from an adult perspective, of family, best friends, first loves, and big dreams waiting to come true. Samantha Bonti is fifteen years old, half Jewish and half Italian, and hesitantly edging toward pure Brooklyn.

Jason Gouvas doesn’t want to believe he has special abilities or that he's an Oldsoul - a vessel for the souls of people who have passed away, but the dead girl in his mind can be very persuasive. Her name is Erin, and through her Jason is able to access the knowledge and skills of the souls within him. And with a group of power-hungry immortals bent on destroying the Oldsouls and overthrowing humanity, he's going to need them all.

Over one busy weekend, small-time heroin dealer Johnny B. Goode and his alliance of fellow pushers work their trade amidst students, businessmen, and assorted sewer rats while avoiding the law. Narrated from the separate perspectives of each member of the gang, The Washington Square Ensemble follows the twisted paths that have led the seven men through the gritty New York underworld and toward a fragile alliance at Washington Square. With humor, compassion, and an uncanny ear for voices of the streets, Madison Smartt Bell delivers a stunning indictment and occasional celebration of a blighted New York landscape.

A New York story, a dark comedy, Balls tells of the thirty-year-old Henry Schiller, a songwriter and lounge-player, in love with a woman far younger and more musically gifted than himself, one with her eye on other men and the rise of her own career, whose crisis deepens when he discovers he has testicular cancer.

Glorette Picard is dead. Her body was found in the alley behind a taqueria, half-hidden by wild tobacco trees, but no one—not Sidney, who knew she worked that alley, not her son Victor who memorizes SAT words to avoid the guys selling rock out of dryers in the Launderland, not her uncle Enrique, who everyone knows will be the one to hunt down her killer—saw her die.

Quiet As They Come is a beautiful and at times brutal portrait of a people caught between two cultures. Set in San Francisco from the 1980s to the present day, this debut collection explores the lives of several families of Vietnamese immigrants as they struggle to adjust to life in their new country, often haunted by the memories and customs of their old lives in Vietnam. While some are able to survive and assimilate, others are crushed by the promise of the "American Dream."

Wooed away from a top job at a competing firm by Ed Roth with promises of breaking the glass ceiling when she succeeds him as the head of the investment bank Drake Carlson, Kate learns that she has real potential for the top spot. First, she must prove her worth by unconventionally putting together an IPO for a small games maker whose most valuable but unknown asset may be a painting stolen from a Jewish family as they fled Austria after the Nazi invasion. Kate’s professional challenges play out amid a family crisis: Her husband’s company is imploding and he may have to relocate to a remote part of China to save even a small portion of his business.

Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is the center of the hipster universe, and the members of the Whole Sick Crew are its shining stars. The gang includes Wolfgang, a heavy metal musician and high school guidance counselor who supplies coke to his charges; Rad, a doctor obsessed with obscure new wave songs who has a bad habit of cutting himself when he's stressed; Beth Ann, the neighborhood's queen knitter who's slowly going blind and Harrison, a museum curator moonlighting as a writer of highly prized porn.

Damasco suona magica e favolosa, e continua a suonare così mentre si riempie di violenza e di fantasmi. Nessuno meglio di Suad Amiry poteva raccontare il fulgore del passato per aprire una porta sul presente. Il racconto comincia nel 1926, nel palazzo di Jiddo e Teta - marmi colorati, soffitti a cassettoni, fontane che bisbigliano nell'ombra -, comincia quando, dopo trent'anni di matrimonio, Teta torna per la prima volta ad 'Arrabeh, il villaggio da cui era partita poco più che bambina per andare in sposa al ricco e nobile mercante damasceno Jiddo.

Carla ha vent'anni e sogna la libertà. Odia l'amore da cui scappa per non esserne dipendente, odia la mancanza d'amore che la fa sentire sola e la costringe alla continua ricerca di altro, ma soprattutto odia la sua famiglia: collusa con la malavita, l'ha privata dell'amor proprio e dell'affetto di suo fratello Claudio, l'unico sentimento in grado di farla sentire completa. Giunta a Roma da un piccolo paesino del Salento, disillusa ma affamata di vita, Carla cerca sé stessa nella stravagante umanità che incontra.

"Tirar mattina" racconta di Aldino che all'alba dei suoi trentatré anni ha deciso di mettere la testa a posto trovando finalmente un lavoro, proprio lui che finora si è arrabattato in mille modi, il più delle volte discutibili, riuscendo a scampare la vita da operaio come suo padre. Ma prima di cominciare la sua nuova vita da uomo adulto e responsabile, vuole festeggiare e decide di farsi un ultimo bicchiere e poi a nanna, o meglio a slòffen.