Showing results by narrator "Xe Sands" in All Categories

In The Dinosaur Tourist, Caitlín R. Kiernan’s 15th collection of short fiction, 19 tales of the unexpected and the uncanny explore that treacherous gulf between what we suppose the world to be and what might actually be waiting out beyond the edges of our day-to-day experience. A mirror may be a window into another time. A cat may be our salvation. Your lover may be a fabulous being. And a hitchhiker may turn out to be anyone at all.

After experiencing a humiliating breakup, 22-year-old Cassandra Clarke is fresh out of college and living a simple, solitary life without any intention of pursuing love anytime soon. When the estate next door sells, the last thing Cassandra expects is the unnerving attraction she feels for her sinfully handsome neighbor, Logan West, the young and charming single father with a playboy reputation.

Maggie Bennett possesses stunning beauty that acts as a disguise for the lethal skills that truly come together to make her tough, icy, and cool. She thought she was ready for anything until she was assigned to protect ex-rock star Mack Pulaski. He aimed his sensual appeal with deadly accuracy - right into Maggie’s heart. Love is full of traps, but it could be a fatal distraction on the sizzling journey that sweeps them from Central America to Zurich, where multi-million-dollar drug deals provide the kind of stakes men kill for.

Three women, from coast to coast and in between, open their mailboxes to the same intriguing invitation. Although leading entirely different lives, each has found herself at a similar, jarring crossroads. Right when these women thought they’d be comfortably settling into middle age, their carefully curated futures have turned out to be dead ends.

Logan West finally has the one thing he believed was unattainable: the fiery woman who challenges, protects, and adores him just as much as she does his young son Oliver. After having her world shaken yet again, Cassandra Clarke is ready to move forward, eagerly embracing the beautiful man who has laid claim to her heart. With secrets revealed at every turn, she refuses to lose the only man she's ever loved. Not every battle is hers to fight, but she's never been one to back down.

Consider this glowing debut from Paige Lewis a menagerie of near-extinction. Space Struck explores the wonders and cruelties occurring within the realms of nature, science, and religion, with the acuity of a sage, the deftness of a hunter, and a hilarious sensibility for the absurd. The universe is seen as an endless arrow “...and it asks only one question: How dare you?” The poems are physically and psychologically tied to the animal world.

In her 20s, Kara Malendar found herself at Le Cordon Bleu culinary school in Paris, thousands of miles away from the harsh media coverage of her political family. But Paris ended abruptly when she was summoned home to Los Angeles and expected to stand in again as the senator’s perfect daughter.

It wasn't his fault she lay broken and battered. He wasn't responsible for the injuries covering her bruised body. Her heart, however, told a different story. She endured the pain of its jagged edges as it shattered against her chest, ripping through the hope she once held. Her spirit was broken, and only one man was to blame for that.

Makenna Rye Conroy was living the dream—with an amazing husband and a beautiful new baby daughter—when one night changed everything. Almost six years after Adam’s death, Makenna and her daughter Paige have built a solid, happy life together. Makenna manages her brother’s trendy restaurant, The Yard, and helps out at Ryeland Farms, the family business, all while navigating the world of private school parenting.

Sage Jeffries grew up an overachiever. She studied, excelled, and became a mechanical engineer for a firm in San Francisco. Yet, much to her family’s surprise, at age 30, she made a bold move to Los Angeles and became a bartender at The Yard.

In his second collection of short stories, James Leo Herlihy explores a landscape of people living on the fringes of normal society as the pleasures of daily life fade. Men and women search for the missing fragment of meaning from their existence with Herlihy’s signature humor and deft dialogue. In the titular story, Mary Ellen McClure is trapped in a dull, unfulfilled life in a trailer park, suspecting her husband of having an affair. Together with her neighbor Ivy, she dabbles with a Ouija board which spells out the name Ezra and implies that Mary Ellen will have an affair.

This debut full-length collection from prose-poet Evan D. Williams comprises two dozen pieces selected from literary journals - including Borderlands and The Mud Season Review - and a further two dozen pieces that appear here for the first time. The audiobook version is narrated by multiple Voice Arts Award winner Xe Sands.

In Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Ammonite Violin & Others, one of contemporary dark fantasy’s most bewitching and distinctive voices is back with another banquet of the weird and unexpected. Within this book, you’ll discover a dazzling suite of stories situated on the borderlands between the unspeakable and the erotic, the grotesque and the sublime.

April, her brother-in-law Oliver, and their families are reuniting in Cape Cod on an exquisite stretch of beach called Dawnland. After eleven summers of building traditions—kayaking, whale watching, bonfires, and ocean swims—this year comes with new threats both on and off the coastline.

Cassidy Morgan's life has always followed a carefully laid track: top education, fulfilling career, and marriage to the love of her life. The next logical step was starting a family. But when a late-term miscarriage threatens to derail everything she's worked so hard for, she finds herself questioning her identity, particularly what it means to be a mother. Unable to move past her guilt and shame, she realizes there's more to fix than a broken heart.

From Boston's social underworld emerges Verena Tarrant, a girl with extraordinary oratorical gifts, which she deploys in tawdry meeting-houses on behalf of "the sisterhood of women." She acquires two admirers of a very different stamp: Olive Chancellor, devotee of radical causes and marked out for tragedy; and Basil Ransom, a veteran of the Civil War who holds rigid views concerning society and women's place therein. Is the lovely, lighthearted Verena made for public movements or private passions?

Chicago, 1916. Doreen O’Dare is fourteen years old when she hops a Hollywood-bound train with her beloved Irish grandmother. Within a decade, her trademark bob and insouciant charm make her the preeminent movie flapper of the Jazz Age. But her success story masks one of relentless ambition, tragedy, and the secrets of a dangerous marriage.

An environmental journalist in Washington, DC, Rachel has shunned her New England working-class family for years. Divorced and childless in her middle age, she’s a true independent spirit with the pain and experience to prove it. Coping with challenges large and small, she thinks her life is in free fall–until she’s summoned home to deal with the aftermath of her mother’s death.

At 26, Maria is holding out for the perfect man to share the rest of her life with. Josh seems to be that man, but after months of dating, their relationship is at a standstill. Maria plans to nudge Josh forward, but when the company she works for is bought out, her new boss Walker seems determined to change Maria’s idea of the perfect man.

When June and her best friends rent a bungalow at a Maui resort, June is charmed by their gorgeous neighbor, Lance. And June has been down enough relationship paths to know that sunsets and beaches are not reality. Okay, so maybe she'll give into one kiss - what can that hurt? Listen to find out more.