Showing results by narrator "Dion Graham" in All Categories

One fateful afternoon, classmates Luca, Yazmine, and Zane stumble upon a strange-looking rock called a geode in one of the rooms at school. To their surprise, a touch of this geode transports them to a magical land named Imperia. The geode is actually a dragon egg! It's one of three Thunder Eggs that needs to be returned home to secret locations in Imperia. Once these eggs hatch, the dragons born from them will restore peace to the land. In order to return the first egg, the kids must face off against the evil ruler of Imperia in a dangerous game.

Christopher Flynn is trying to get it right. After years of trouble and rebellion that enraged his father and nearly cost him his life, he has a steady job in his father's company, he's seriously dating a woman he respects, and, aside from the distrust that lingers in his father's eyes, his mistakes are firmly in the past. One day on the job, Chris and his partner come across a temptation almost too big to resist. Chris does the right thing, but old habits and instincts rise to the surface, threatening this newfound stability with sudden treachery and violence.

In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter's college tuition, and finally do something great. In A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers takes us around the world to show how one man fights to hold himself and his splintering family together in the face of the global economy's gale-force winds. This taut, richly layered, and elegiac novel is a powerful evocation of our contemporary moment - and a moving story of how we got here.

Don’t be intimidated by Shakespeare! These popular guides make the Bard’s plays accessible and enjoyable.

It’s the summer of 2019, and Professor Pi Suleman is a Black man from Memphis with a lot to endure - not only as a Black man in Trump’s America but in his hard-earned career as an adjunct professor. Pi is constantly forced to bite his tongue in the face of one of his tenured colleague’s prejudices and microaggressions. At the same time, he’s being blackmailed by a powerful professor who threatens to claim he has assaulted her, when in fact the truth is just the opposite, trapping him in a he-said-she-said with a white woman that, in this society, Pi knows he will never win.

Outside the apartment where a wake is going on, the manager of the A&P across the street is robbed. Reverend Short, a storefront preacher addicted to opium and brandy, is watching from a bedroom window in the flat. He leans out too far and falls, but a huge bread basket, sitting outside the bakery below, saves him. Back inside, he says he sees a vision of a dead man. Outside, in the very basket Short landed in, lies the body of Valentine Haines. Who murdered Val? It is up to Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson to find out.

Rutherford Calhoun, a puckish rogue and newly freed slave, spends his days loitering around the docks of New Orleans, dodging debt collectors, gangsters and Isadora Bailey, a prim and frugal woman who seeks to marry him and curb his mischievous instincts. When the heat from these respective pursuers becomes too much to bear, he cons his way on to the next ship leaving the dock: the Republic. Upon boarding, to his horror he discovers that he is on an illegal slave ship embarking on the Middle Passage.

Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America and winner of countless awards—including the Hugo, Nebula, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bram Stoker—Harlan Ellison proved once more that he was both unpredictable and irrepressible in this second collection of innovative science fiction. Again, Dangerous Visions—the middle installment in a planned three anthology series—includes award-winning stories from incomparable writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Gene Wolfe, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Piers Anthony, Dean Koontz, and James Tiptree, among many others.

A modern, Southern reinvention of The Maltese Falcon, Crossroad Blues won noir fans with its nod to the masters and thrilled readers with a wild ride along Highway 61. It’s here that we first meet Nick Travers, an ex-New Orleans Saint turned Tulane University blues historian. Nick searches for the lost recordings of 1930s bluesman Robert Johnson—and a missing colleague—and finds trouble at every turn.

International hit man Gideon never misses his target, but when a job in Detroit goes bad, he should have killed his client - a cold-blooded woman who hired him to kill her husband - when he had the chance. Now the city's mayor and with money and power to spare, this woman will stop at nothing to see that Gideon gets what he deserves.

"Boys, let us get up a club." Six restless young men raided the linens at a friend's mansion, pulled pillowcases over their heads, hopped on horses, and cavorted through the streets of Pulaski, Tennessee. The six friends named their club the Ku Klux Klan, and, all too quickly, their club grew into the self-proclaimed Invisible Empire with secret dens spread across the South. This is the story of how a secret terrorist group took root in America's democracy.

"You can be beautiful, even more beautiful than before." This is the seductive promise of Dr. Nzinga’s clinic, where anyone can get their lips thinned, their skin bleached, and their nose narrowed. A complete demelanization will liberate you from the confines of being born in a Black body - if you can afford it. In this near-future Southern city plagued by fenced-in ghettos and police violence, more and more residents are turning to this experimental medical procedure. Like any father, our narrator just wants the best for his son, Nigel, a biracial boy.

You can’t have a good tale of monster hunting without monsters. And sometimes the monsters don’t need to be hunted. Sometimes it’s fun sitting back at minimum safe distance and watching the mayhem.

Team Dragon is back! This time Luca, Yazmine, and Zane have landed in the icy region of North Gelida. Here they must navigate giant frozen waves and outrun a hungry monster made of snow to return the second Thunder Egg to its frosty palace. But Dartsmith, the evil leader of Imperia, is always lurking, determined to make sure the dragon prophecy won't come true. He'll do whatever it takes to win the Dragon Games-but Luca, Yazmine, and Zane are determined to stop him!

Richard Pryor was arguably the single most influential performer of the second half of the twentieth century, and certainly he was the most successful black actor/comedian ever. Controversial and somewhat enigmatic in his lifetime, Pryor's performances opened up a new world of possibilities, merging fantasy with angry reality in a way that wasn't just new - it was heretofore unthinkable. His childhood in Peoria, Illinois, was spent just trying to survive.

Sera has a secret. She’s seen the future, and it is terrifying. Unfortunately, she can’t do anything to prevent the Cataclysm while stranded with Dak and Riq thousands of years in the past. Their only hope lies with the ancient Maya, a mysterious people who claim to know a great deal about the future. Is there more to these ancients than meets the eye?

Stany Nyandwi’s gift for communicating with chimpanzees is so special that world-renowned primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall has called him a “chimpanzee whisperer.” His skills and devotion to these creatures—our closest living relatives, with whom we share 98.7 percent of our DNA—have earned him international awards and sent him on travels within Africa and around the world. But he began life in poverty, born and raised in a dirt-floor, straw-roofed hut in rural Burundi. The Chimpanzee Whisperer is the story of his astonishing life journey.

Alex Cross is drawn into a bitter personal battle against corruption, conspiracy and savage violence in a chase that takes him through a vast and uncompromising landscape. When Cross is called to investigate a massacre-style murder scene, he is shocked to find that the victim is an old friend. Angry, hurt and more determined than ever, Cross begins the hunt for the perpetrators of this cruel crime.

Thirteen-year-old T'Challa can't wait to go back to America to visit his friends Sheila and Zeke, who are staying with Sheila's grandmother in Beaumont, a small Alabama town, over their summer break. He's thrilled to be on vacation away from his duties as the Prince of Wakanda for a few weeks, and he's taking full advantage of his access to the amazing food and the South's rich history.

New York is sweltering in the summer heat, and Harlem is close to the boiling point. To Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, at times it seems as if the whole world has gone mad. Trying, as always, to keep some kind of peace - their legendary nickel-plated Colts very much in evidence - Coffin Ed and Grave Digger find themselves pursuing two completely different cases through a maze of knifings, beatings, and riots that threatens to tear Harlem apart.