検索キーワード： ナレーター "Robin Eller" すべてのカテゴリー

The Best American Short Stories 2021 immerse the listener in powerfully imagined worlds and allowing them to bring some of that power into their own lives. From a stirring portrait of Rodney King’s final days to a surreal video game set in the Middle East, with real consequences, to an indigenous boy’s gripping escape from his captors, this collection renders profoundly empathetic depictions of the variety of human experience.

This year’s selection of science fiction and fantasy stories, chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and bestselling author of the Divergent series Veronica Roth, showcases a crop of authors that are willing to experiment and tantalize readers with new takes on classic themes and by exchanging the ordinary for the avant-garde. Folktales and lore come alive, the dead rise, the depths of space are traversed, and magic threads itself through singular moments of love and loss, illuminating the circulatory nature of life, death, the in-between, and the hereafter.

For years, Christena Cleveland spoke about racial reconciliation to congregations, justice organizations, and colleges. But she increasingly felt she could no longer trust in the God she’d been implicitly taught to worship—a white male God who preferentially empowered white men despite his claim to love all people. A God who clearly did not relate to, advocate for, or affirm a Black woman like Christena.

A good cop can always spot trouble. That’s why my senses started pinging the moment I met the hottie next door. The neighborhood may never be the same. First, she confuses me for a male stripper and tries to remove my uniform. (The guys on the force will never let me live that down.) And then there’s the breaking and entering. I don’t know what to do with her. My libido has a few ideas of its own, though. Bad, bad ideas.

Who do you trust when you have no one left but yourself? Kenzie is a military-trained assassin, hunting her target in Mexico. Cori is a student at the University of Guadalajara. One fateful afternoon their lives will come together under a flurry of gunfire. Questioning the lies around them, they will soon learn that they can not live without each other. On the run from an unknown enemy, they must learn to trust each other, and to believe they'll make it out alive.

Before she meets the Empress Blair, Anne Manx wants nothing more than to spend her quiet vacation getting a tan. Empress Blair, though, has a compelling problem. Her father has been killed, and she fears she's next. If Anne Manx can keep the Empress alive for mere two months, she'll reach her 18th birthday and take over for her father. Complicating things is Mr. Logan. who shows up just in time - but whose side is he on? Nothing is ever easy for Anne Manx, and she's rapidly running out of lives.

In Our Auntie Rosa, Mrs. Parks' loved ones share their remembrances and reflections to create a previously unpainted picture of the real woman behind the legend. Rosa Parks largely disappeared from the public when she and her husband, Raymond, relocated to Detroit in 1957, escaping the violently racist South. It was in Detroit where Mrs. Parks reconnected with her only sibling, Sylvester McCauley, whom she affectionately called "Brother", and her 13 nieces and nephews.

Thirteen-year-old Billie Simms doesn't think her hometown of Anniston, Alabama, should be segregated, but few of the town's residents share her opinion. As equality spreads across the country and the Civil Rights Movement gathers momentum, Billie can't help but feel stuck - and helpless - in a stubborn town too set in its ways to realize that the world is passing it by.

Urban magic is afoot when a sleek white Impala follows a runner along her course, an automotive reminder of mortality and a telescoper of a lifetime in a few sweaty miles.

Eight-year-old Leeza hates the boys on twenty-fifth street. Worse than anything, she thinks, after they spit on her and tell her she smells. At home, Leeza's stepmother shows her no sympathy, scrubbing her skin raw and ordering her to chew gum. When the teasing from the "beady-eyed" twins on twenty-fifth takes a dangerous turn, so does the tension between Leeza, her stepmother, and her father.

Every girl has a vision of what it will be like to surrender her virginity, but it doesn’t always work out according to plan. Choosing whom you will love first is a way of choosing who you intend to become.

When 17-year-old Giulia, the orphaned, illegitimate daughter of a Milanese nobleman, learns she’s to be packed off to a life behind convent walls, she begs an astrologer-sorcerer for a talisman that will secure what she’s certain is her heart’s desire: true love and a place where she belongs. But does she really know the compass of her heart? The convent of Santa Marta is full of surprises, including a workshop of nuns who are creating paintings of astonishing beauty using a luminous blue mixed from a secret formula: Passion Blue.

When acclaimed mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers first began compiling anthologies of the best crime stories in the 1920s and ’30s, the genre was in the flush of its first golden age. While it is hard to imagine today - after every possible mystery plot has been told, retold, subverted, and played straight again by hundreds of writers over nearly a century - in Sayers’s day there were still twists that had never been seen, and machinations of crime that would shock even jaded Jazz Age fans.

Venice is high on April Stockwood’s list of romantic ports of call. Things get off to an ominous start when she arrives in Italy and a mishap leaves her with no place to stay. But her bad karma turns into a lucky break when she reconnects with Hayden Calloway. Now a diplomat with the American consulate, Hayden was April’s greatest crush when they attended high school together in Philadelphia.

Showcasing the work of literary giants like Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and authors whom listeners may be surprised to learn were "in the life", Black Like Us is the most comprehensive collection of fiction by African American lesbian, gay, and bisexual writers ever published.

The year is 2120. The humans are dead. The mages have retreated from the world after a madman blew up civilization with weaponized magical technology. Safe within domes that protect them from the nuclear wasteland on the other side, the mages have spent the last century putting their lives back together.

Seahawks star running back Curt Warner and his wife, Ana, were prominent figures in Seattle in the early 1990s. When they dropped from the public eye after Curt’s retirement, everyone assumed it was for a simpler life. But the reality behind their seclusion was a secret they hid from even their closest friends: their twins, Austin and Christian, had been diagnosed with severe autism. What followed was a painful struggle to hold their family and their marriage together in a home filled with chaos, emotional exhaustion, and constant fear for the safety of their unpredictable but beloved boys.

Dr. Niki Hamilton has given up on men and is focusing her attention on her patients. After three kids in her care die, she is determined to get away from nasty threats and ugly reporters. Niki goes to the Jersey Shore to visit her friend, ex-Playboy centerfold, Kim. She ends up running Kim's dating service, "Coffee Mates". Cary Thomas, a hot gardener (or so Niki thinks) arrives with plants, a sexy smile, and lots of personality. Whenever he's near, Niki's hormones go into overdrive.

On her 17th birthday in 1973, Janice Hunter met Marvin Gaye - the soulful prince of Motown with the seductive liquid voice whose chart-topping, socially conscious album What's Going On made him a superstar two years earlier. Despite a 16-year-age difference and Marvin's marriage to the sister of Berry Gordy, Motown's founder, the star-struck teenager and the emotionally volatile singer began a scorching relationship.

It's 1876 and Dr. Viveca Lancaster is frustrated by the limits placed upon female physicians of color. When she is offered the chance to set up a practice in the small all-black community of Grayson Grove, Michigan, she leaves her California home and heads east. The very determined Viveca knows all about fighting for her rights. But she may need more than determination to face down the distractingly handsome Nate Grayson, the Grove's bull-headed mayor.