Showing results by narrator "Keith Szarabajka" in All Categories

Told through many notes in four books and an epilogue, Sherwood Anderson’s memoir of Midwestern life and culture journeys through the author’s own imaginative world and through the world of facts. From Anderson’s childhood to his attempt to ingratiate himself with New York’s literary elite, A Story Teller’s Story is a unique look into the psyche of an American icon.

Have you ever read a suspense novel so good you had to stop and think to yourself, "How did the author come up with this idea? Their characters? Is some of this story real?" For more than five years, Mark Rubinstein, physician, psychiatrist, and mystery and thriller writer, had the chance to ask the most well-known authors in the field just these kinds of questions in interviews for the Huffington Post. Collected here are interviews with 47 accomplished authors, including Michael Connelly, Ken Follett, Meg Gardiner, Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman, and Don Winslow.

1941. An hour before the attack on Pearl Harbour, a man from the future materializes in President Roosevelt's office. His offer of military aid may cut the war and its pending atrocities short and alter the course of the future. The future. Welcome to Mars, where the lives of three ordinary people become entwined in one dingy smokesbar the moment an assassin opens fire. The target: the mysterious Bill Glimmung. But is Glimmung even real?

Sam Acquillo has spent most of his time in the Hamptons hanging out with the other half of the moneyed wonderland cops and bartenders, carpenters, store clerks, and firemen. He couldn't care less about the concerns of the one percent, until his best friend, a certified billionaire, is dragged into a high-profile death investigation. For some, there is no power without prestige, and no prestige that can't be bought. The rich can achieve a level of depravity and hate both invisible, and incomprehensible, to the rest of us.

It's bad enough when someone you know is brutally murdered; it's worse when the guy was a paranoid schizophrenic helplessly bound to a wheelchair. Sam Acquillo and Jackie Swaitkowski tried to look after Alfie Aldergreen, as had others around the Village of Southampton, but now they were forced to wonder what else they could have done.

A Is for Alien is award-winning author Caitlín R. Kiernan’s first collection devoted entirely to her science-fiction work. It includes the critically acclaimed novelette Riding the White Bull, along with seven other tales of a less-than-utopian future. Ranging from the wastelands and mountains of Mars to the streets of a late 21st-century Manhattan, from the moons of Europa and Saturn to an iceless Antarctica, these tales bring Kiernan’s trademark brand of the eco-gothic to bear on what it means to be human and the paths and decisions that may face mankind....

Smoky knows only one way of life: freedom. Living on the open range, he is free to go where he wants to and do what he wants to. And he knows what he has to do to survive. Smoky can beat any enemy, whether it be a rattlesnake or a hungry wolf. He is as much a part of the Wild West as it is of him, and Smoky can’t imagine anything else. Then he comes across a new enemy, one that walks on two legs and makes funny sounds. Smoky can’t beat this enemy the way he has all the others. But does he really want to?

A routine visit to one of Sam Acquillo's job sites becomes anything but. The home's owner, Victor Bollings, is lying in a pool of blood, the back of his head bashed in. One of Sam's closest friends in the cabinetry trade is quickly behind bars as the obvious suspect. For the cops, this is all standard operating procedure. But as it turns out, nothing about the case is routine, obvious, or standard in any way.

They call it Stormland: a sprawling, largely abandoned region of the southeastern coast of the USA, where climate change’s extreme weather conditions have brought about a “perfect storm” of perpetual tempests; where hurricane-strength storms return day after day, 365 days a year. The heart of Stormland is Charleston, South Carolina, a flooded ruin where hundreds of people remain for their own peculiar reasons; where thugs prey on the weak, and a strangely benevolent cult tries to keep everyone insanely sane. Here, plutocratic evil takes advantage of Stormland’s lawlessness.

Simeon thought he was living a good life - solving mysteries, falling in and out of love, risking life and limb to do the right thing. Then the last Simeon Grist mystery was pulped to make newsprint, and he woke up in a room where nothing ever changed except his sense of who he was: His entire existence was a work of fiction that the real world was in the process of forgetting. And when one of his few remaining readers is murdered, Simeon discovers that he can step out of the pages of his books and into the world of the living.

Orchard Grove is a town like any other, with quiet neighborhoods and apple groves...though Ethan, the depressed screenplay writer, and his secretive wife, Susan, would tell you differently. So would the seductive serial killer living next door. The apple trees are fertilized with evil, and the backyard fences aren't enough to stop the manipulative mind games and dangerous lies. The lines between good and evil are blurred and then erased as Ethan does what it takes to survive.

With the premiere of two new film versions of the Snow White tale, Blackstone enters the fray with its own adult, edgy, and not altogether serious full-cast exposé of fairy-taledom. At last it can be told! Was Snow White really as pure as the driven snow? Did her allegedly wicked stepmother get a bum rap from the Grimm brothers? What went on behind the closed Dutch doors of the dwarves’ cottage? How many handsome princes does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Rome. Holy Thursday. A limousine carrying two pilgrims speeds toward the city. Rail, an American publisher, an obese voluptuary, perspires in the heat and shivers with the icy premonition of death. His companion, Harwell, is running a cold fever of bigotry and violence, self-indulgence, and sadism: He is an American Nazi. The two must separate soon, must not be seen together, for they are to be the instruments of a public murder.

In the wake of San Francisco Noir, Los Angeles Noir, and Orange County Noir - all popular volumes in the Akashic Noir Series - comes the latest California installment, Oakland Noir. Masterfully curated by Jerry Thompson and Eddie Muller, the "Czar of Noir", this volume will shock, titillate, provoke, and entertain. The diverse cast of talented contributors will not disappoint.

Small-town boys Caleb and Jake Boyd spend their days splitting logs and barely scraping by in the badlands of New Mexico. Caleb, a decorated war hero, wants to put his fighting days behind him, find a decent job, and start a quiet life with his new fiancée. But Jake is always dreaming bigger than he should, and when he stumbles across a large crop of marijuana hidden in the wilderness, he thinks he has finally hit the jackpot.

Harrison has tremendous fun with his own reputation in the title novella about an aging writer in Montana who spars with his estranged wife, with whom he still shares a home; weathers the slings and arrows of literary success; and tries to cope with the sow he buys on a whim and the unplanned litter of piglets that follow soon after. In "Eggs", a Montana woman reminisces about staying in London with her grandparents and collecting eggs at their country house. Years later, having never had a child, she attempts to do so.

Edgar and Macavity Award nominee Timothy Hallinan's Simeon Grist private-eye novels have become cult favorites. This sixth series installment takes place in the West Hollywood of 1995, where the community is shaken by the brutal killing of an older man who was widely loved for his generosity and kindness. In a time when the police were largely indifferent to crimes against gay people, Simeon is hired to catch the murderer - and finds himself up against the most dangerous adversary of his career.

Edgar and Macavity Award-nominated author Timothy Hallinan throws his erudite Los Angeles private eye into the middle of a global human-trafficking operation in this fifth book in the series. Simeon Grist does a favor for the family of his sometimes-girlfriend, Eleanor Chan, and goes looking for two children who vanished in Chinatown. He quickly learns that he's gone straight through the looking glass and into a world where grieving parents are afraid to contact the police, where fear is the teacher and power is the law.

Before his stroke and the onset of old age, Frank Lazorg was the king of the fantasy illustrators - with an ego to match. But he can paint no more. That is, until he starts taking a bizarre new drug that promises to restore his creative powers. Unfortunately, artistic reinvigoration comes with a steep price tag: addiction and madness. With his rage and jealousy unleashed and his grasp of reality severely compromised, Lazorg is led to commit an unspeakable act, and, in turn, is led... somewhere else.

After decades apart, the five siblings find themselves together again at their ailing mother’s bedside, caught in a deadlocked feud over her hospice care. Into the morass steps Murron Teinetoa, one of their bastard children, who carries an idealistic hope of finally fitting in among her estranged relatives.In an interweaving narrative, Malae portrays the Felices in their formative years of the fifties; he excavates the personal lives of the siblings in the eighties and nineties; and he follows Murron in the present as she raises her son as a single mother.