Bronson Pinchot has narrated 161 audiobooks on Listento.it by 139 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.3★ across 1,957 ratings. The most-rated is Necronomicon.
Immortality, Inc.
Summary
Want to be immortal? You can be in AD 2110. Just go to the Hereafter Insurance Corporation and hook yourself up to the Machine. There’s nothing to fear. That is, if it happens to be working right, and if nobody slips another mind into your body when you’re not looking, and if you’re not on a poltergeist hatelist… First published in 1959 as a startling, revolutionary novel of the future—then pushed to new cinematic limits as the feature film adaptation Freejack in 1992—Robert Sheckley’s unsettling vision of tomorrow is a trenchantly witty novel of a future where everything has improved except the bumbling human race, which just can’t let itself enjoy a good thing when it finally gets it. Thomas Blaine awoke in a white bed in a white room and heard someone say, “He’s alive now.” Then they asked him his name, age, and marital status. Yes, that seemed normal enough—but what was this talk about “death trauma”? Thus was Thomas Blaine introduced to the year 2110, when science had discovered the technique of transferring a man’s consciousness from one body to another, when a man’s mind could be snatched from the past, as his body was at the point of death, and brought forward into a “host body” in this fantastic future world. But that was only a small part of it, for the future had proved the reality of life after death and discovered worlds beyond or simultaneous with our own—worlds where, through scientific techniques, a man could live again, in another body, when he died here—and had in the process established the reality of ghosts, poltergeists, and zombies. What did it all mean? How had this discovery of what they called the “hereafter” shaped the world of 2110? Thomas Blaine found himself living in a future where the discoveries and techniques imagined by people of his time, though realized, were completely overwhelmed by discoveries no one had ever dreamed of.
©1959 Robert Sheckley (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Downward to the Earth
Summary
A lone man must make a journey across a once-colonized alien planet abandoned by mankind when it was discovered that the species there were actually sentient. Gundersen returns to Holman’s World seeking atonement for his harsh years as colonial governor. But now this lush, exotic planet of mystery is called by its ancient name of Belzagor, and it belongs once again to its native alien races, the nildoror and the sulidoror. Drawn by its spell, Gundersen begins a harrowing pilgrimage to its mist-shrouded north to witness a strange ritual rebirth that will alter him forever. This is one of Silverberg’s most intense novels and draws heavily on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It puts listeners at the heart of the experience and forces them to ask what they would do in the same circumstances.
©1969 Robert Silverberg (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Cross Country Runner
Summary
The Cross Country Runner brings together The Last Worthless Evening, Andre Dubus' fifth collection of short stories and novellas, and Voices from the Moon, his longest, most masterful novella, along with previously uncollected stories and a new introduction by PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author Tobias Wolff. "'It's divorce that did it,' his father had said last night." So begins Voices from the Moon, the novella that shows Dubus at the height of his empathetic powers. Alternating between the viewpoints of Richie Stowe, a serious 12-year-old who plans to become a priest, and the five other members of his family, the story takes place over the course of a single day. The four novellas and two stories of The Last Worthless Evening range further than those of any previous Dubus collection - racial tension in the Navy, a detective-story homage, a Hispanic shortstop, the unlikely pairing of an 11-year-old kid and a dangerous Vietnam vet. This third volume in the series also draws together for the first time many of Dubus' previously uncollected stories, including work from the mid-1960s and the late 1990s. The earliest story appearing here in audiobook form for the first time is "The Cross Country Runner", which was originally published in the long-defunct Midwestern University Quarterly in 1966 when Dubus was 30 years old and only recently graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. The final story - the Western-themed "Sisters" - is the last piece of fiction Dubus was working on when he died suddenly in 1999 at just 63 years old.
©2018 David R Godine (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Zeroville
Summary
On the same August day in 1969 that a crazed hippie "family" led by Charles Manson commits five savage murders in the canyons above Los Angeles, a young ex-communicated seminarian arrives with images of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift - "the two most beautiful people in the history of the movies" - tattooed on his head. At once childlike and violent, Vikar is not a cineaste but "cineautistic", sleeping at night in the Roosevelt Hotel where he's haunted by the ghost of D. W. Griffith. Vikar has stepped into the vortex of a culture in upheaval: strange drugs that frighten him, a strange sexuality that consumes him, a strange music he doesn't understand. Over the course of the 70s and into the 80s, he pursues his obsession with film from one screening to the next and through a series of cinema-besotted conversations and encounters with starlets, burglars, guerrillas, escorts, teenage punks, and veteran film editors, only to discover a secret whose clues lie in every film ever made.
©2013 Steve Erickson (P)2014 Blackstone Audio
A Dredging in Swann
Summary
Two investigations start at the same time in Swann County, North Carolina, one by the FBI, the other by the sheriff. The feds want to know who stole three Stinger missiles during a helicopter crash. The sheriff wants to know who hanged a black ex-con in a well. Seb Creek, a sheriff’s detective, gets involved in both investigations and fights through lies, secrets, and murder to find the killer. The trail involves a long-ago axe murder, the ravages of combat, an outdoor gas chamber, a mystery at the bottom of a well, and finally a last killing and an ancient testament. A Dredging in Swann is a tale that deals powerfully with themes of war, race, justice, and, in the end, with healing. Sometimes, justice has to wait. Sometimes, it won’t.
©2020 Tim Garvin (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing
Lethal Force
Summary
Jake Adams has seemingly retired and gone fly fishing in Patagonia. But his quiet retreat is interrupted when the Agency sends a man to retrieve him to testify before a congressional committee. His testimony quickly becomes an internet sensation - not a good thing for an autonomous operative. Meanwhile, a college professor is murdered in Oregon and his colleague is nearly killed, sending him running for his life. Jake is drawn back into the shadowy world of espionage to retrieve this professor in Montana and secure his new technology that will make nuclear weapons obsolete. Eventually, Jake finds himself in South Korea in a battle for his life to secure the technology, save a beautiful congresswoman, and stop a cabal of agents from a despotic regime and misguided opportunists. Follow Jake in his most poignant adventure that could either end his life or save his own soul.
©2013 Trevor Scott (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Penance: An Extinction Cycle Story
Summary
There is no escaping the evil lurking in the shadows.... After the harrowing trials of Emergence, Jed Welch finds himself alone in the ruins of New York City. But not all is lost. USMC Staff Sergeant Alexandra Gallegos and the two surviving members of her platoon find Jed, and together they will bring the full weight of their Marine Corps training, and mission-driven sense of vengeance, to bear upon the real monsters: human collaborators who aid the Variants at the expense of their fellow human beings. For SSGT Gallegos, theirs is a mission borne of duty and command. For Jed, it becomes an act of penance, in hopes he may atone for his sins.
©2019 AJ Sikes (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Father's Day
Summary
The moving story of an orphaned girl named Harvey and the troubled uncle who raises her - an unforgettable tale of loss and redemption from the author of The Illusion of Separateness. At the age of six, a little girl named Harvey learns that her parents have died in a car accident. As she struggles to understand, a kindly social worker named Wanda introduces her to her only living relative: her uncle Jason, a disabled felon with a violent past and a criminal record. Despite his limitations - and his resistance - Wanda follows a hunch and cajoles Jason into becoming her legal guardian, convinced that each may be the other's last chance. Moving between past and present, Father's Day weaves together the story of Harvey's childhood and her life as a young woman in Paris, as she awaits her uncle's arrival for a Father's Day visit. To mark the occasion, Harvey has planned a series of gifts for Jason - all leading to a revelation she believes will only deepen their bond. With extraordinary empathy and emotional impact, the award-winning writer Simon Van Booy has crafted a simple yet luminous novel of loss and transcendence, second chances and forgiveness: a breakthrough work from one of our most gifted chroniclers of the human heart.
©2016 Simon Van Booy (P)2016 HarperCollins Publishers
The Winter Father
Summary
While the title novella of Dubus' Finding a Girl in America returns to the somewhat off-the-rails literary life of Hank Allison, the collection's opening story strikes a much darker tone: "Killings" - the basis of the Academy Award-nominated film In the Bedroom - is a swift tale of revenge that leaves listeners wondering what they might do in the name of family love. Dubus' prowess with narrative compression is on full display in the story "Waiting": the hollow ache experienced by a woman widowed by the Korean War took Dubus 14 months to write and was more than 100 pages in early manuscript form but spans a mere seven pages in published form. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Joyce Carol Oates called "The Pretty Girl" - the opening novella of The Times Are Never so Bad - "[T]he most compelling and suspenseful work of fiction [Dubus] has written". Richard Russo's introduction to this volume grapples with his complex feelings on reading Dubus' work over many decades, but when it comes to the much-anthologized masterpiece "A Father's Story", Russo writes: "I won't mince words. It's one of the finest stories ever penned by an American."
©2018 David R Godine (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Guys Read: Thriller
Summary
A body on the tracks A teenage terrorist A mysterious wish-granting machine The world's worst private detective The second volume in the Guys Read Library of Great Reading is chock-full of mystery, intrigue, and nefarious activity. Featuring some of the best writers around, and compiled by certified guy Jon Scieszka, Guys Read: Thriller is a pulse-pounding collection of brand-new short stories, each one guaranteed to keep you riveted until the final page.
©2011 Jon Scieszka (P)2011 HarperCollinsPublishers
Serpent's Fury: A Space Opera Noir Technothriller
Summary
The Expanse meets The Godfather in the third volume of The SynCorp Saga: Empire Earth, a series of space opera/noir thrillers about corporate greed, rebellion, and mankind’s survival among the stars. The final battle for SynCorp’s survival comes home to where it all began: Earth. Masada Station is secured. Adriana Rabh, Regent of Callisto, has evaded capture. But Cassandra is about to put Tony Taulke, the CEO and living symbol of SynCorp itself, on trial for his life. Ruben Qinlao leaps into action to free Tony, while Stacks Fischer escorts Bekah Franklin to the Moon to complete Project Jericho - key to defeating Cassandra. Meanwhile, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 13-year-old Benjy Anderson faces the toughest moment of his young life as his mother falls victim to Dreamscape’s addictive seduction. But then he catches a conqueror's golden eye... SynCorp and the SSR prepare for a bloody engagement above Earth, mankind's birthplace and the seat of the largest corporate empire in history. Who will live? Who will die? What fate awaits humanity when the dust of battle clears?
©2018 Hip Phoenix Publishing (P)2020 Aethon Audio
The Bootlace Magician
Summary
Welcome back to Circus Mirandus...a place with magic so wondrous, you need to believe it to see it. Micah Tuttle - magician in training - lives and works at Circus Mirandus alongside his guardian, the ancient and powerful Lightbender. The circus is a place filled with dazzling fire shows, stubborn unicorns, and magicians from every corner of the world. And Micah is doing everything he can to prove he belongs there. When a dangerous enemy from the past threatens his new home, Micah will have to untangle the mystery of his own potent magic, and he'll have to do it fast. With trouble this deadly on its way, every magician will need to be ready to fight. Even the youngest.
©2019 Cassie Beasley (P)2019 Listening Library
Jefferson Measures a Moose
Summary
Thomas Jefferson was wild about numbers. He was constantly counting, measuring, and observing things that caught his interest. He loved sharing his discoveries and reading the discoveries of others. But when a famous Frenchman published a book about America, Jefferson was appalled: All the information in the book was wrong. The author insisted that America was a wretched, dismal place, where birds could not sing, dogs could not bark, and everything and everyone was puny and weak. Thomas Jefferson resolved to set the record straight - with numbers - and prove to the world that the new nation was worthy of investment. But how do you show that a country is plentiful in an age when photography hasn’t been invented yet? Mara Rockliff, master of children’s nonfiction, details another little-known moment in math and natural history.
©2020 Mara Rockliff (P)2020 Dreamscape Media, LLC
Accidental Genius
Summary
When it comes to creating ideas, we hold ourselves back. That's because inside each of us is an internal editor whose job is to forever polish our thoughts, so we sound smart and in control, and so that we fit into society. But what happens when we encounter problems for which such conventional thinking fails us? How can we get unstuck? For Mark Levy, the answer is freewriting, a technique he's used for years to solve all types of business problems and generate ideas for books, articles, and blog posts. Freewriting is deceptively simple: Start writing as fast as you can, for as long as you can, about a subject you care deeply about, while ignoring the standard rules of grammar and spelling. Your internal editor won't be able to keep up with your output, and will be temporarily shunted into the background. You'll now be able to think more honestly and resourcefully than before, and will generate breakthrough ideas and solutions that you couldn't have created any other way. Levy shares six freewriting secrets designed to knock out your editor and let your genius run free. He also includes 15 problem-solving and creativity-stimulating principles you can use if you need more firepower - seven of which are new to this edition - and stories of problems he and others have solved through freewriting. Also new to this edition: an extensive section on how to refine your freewriting into something you can share with the world. Although Levy originally taught freewriting as a private brainstorming technique, over the years he and his clients have found that, with some tweaking, it's a great way to generate content for books, articles, and other thought-leadership pieces.
©2010 Mark Andrew Levy (P)2010 Audible, Inc
The Ides
Summary
The assassination of Julius Caesar is one of the most notorious murders in history. Even now, many questions remain about his death: Was Brutus the hero and Caesar the villain? Was Mark Antony aware of the plot? Using historical evidence to sort out these and other puzzling issues, historian and award-winning author Stephen Dando-Collins recaptures the drama of Caesar's demise and the chaotic aftermath as the vicious struggle unfolded for power between Antony and Octavian. For the first time, he shows how the religious festivals and customs of the day impacted how the assassination plot unfolded and how the murder was almost avoided at the last moment. A compelling history packed with intrigue and written with the pacing of a first-rate mystery, The Ides will challenge what we think we know about Julius Caesar and the Roman Empire.
©2010 Stephen Dando-Collins (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Missing Links
Summary
From Sports Illustrated writer Rick Reilly comes this spoof of all things golf and country club. Missing Links is the story of four middle-class buddies who live outside Boston and play golf together at Ponkaquogue Municipal Golf Links and Deli, not so fondly known as Ponky. An 18-hole garbage dump with hazards that include a concrete river surrounded by a chain-link fence and the pillars of the elevated train that runs through the course, it is reputed to be the worst golf course in America. One day the group inadvertently discovers that all along they've been playing right next door to the Mayflower Club, a true golfing Eden. The rollicking plot includes a bet to see who will be first to sneak in a round at the Mayflower, as well as the narrator's attempts to reach some sort of reasonable understanding with his overbearing father.
©1996 Rick Reilly (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Dublin Noir
Summary
Brand new stories by: Ken Bruen, Eoin Colfer, Jason Starr, Laura Lippman, Olen Steinhauer, Peter Spiegelman, Kevin Wignall, Jim Fusilli, John Rickards, Patrick J. Lambe, Charlie Stella, Ray Banks, James O. Born, Sarah Weinman, Pat Mullan, Gary Phillips, Craig McDonald, Duane Swierczynski, Reed Farrel Coleman, and others. Irish crime-fiction sensation Ken Bruen and cohorts shine a light on the dark streets of Dublin. Dublin Noir features an awe-inspiring cast of writers who between them have won all major mystery and crime-fiction awards. This collection introduces secret corners of a fascinating city and surprise assaults on the "Celtic Tiger" of modern Irish prosperity.
©2006 Akashic Books (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Expanded Universe, Vol. 2
Summary
For the millions of Heinlein fans around the world comes a guided tour through the thoughts and insights of "one of the most influential writers in American literature" (New York Times Book Review). Robert A. Heinlein has been hailed as one of the most forward-thinking science fiction writers of all time, and Expanded Universe (presented in two volumes) offers the perfect collection of his works to provide listeners with true insights into his uniquely creative mind. Heinlein personally selected each story or essay for inclusion in this collection, which is ordered chronologically, with volume two picking up with "Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon". This remarkable collection highlights the development of Heinlein's writing style and his philosophy on life throughout his career. More importantly, this collection is as close to an autobiography as anything Heinlein wrote during his life. Heinlein was an extremely private person who never wrote much about himself. In this exclusive collection, he offers forewords to most of his stories and essays (and an occasional afterword), giving listeners a rare glimpse into the inner mind of the master. Expanded Universe, Vol. 2 is a must-have for any Heinlein enthusiast and any fan of science fiction.
©2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc. (P)2015 Blackstone Audio
Bottom Feeders
Summary
An addictive whodunit set in the wilds of a remote movie ranch, Bottom Feeders describes the hapless Hollywood cast and crew that eke out a living working on low-budget fare. Their ambitious TV-movie needs to be made fast and cheap, but a brutal murder grinds production to a halt. An approaching forest fire forces everyone to evacuate. In the confusion not everyone gets out. Eddie is the alcoholic director, Sheila the vulnerable camera assistant, Tom the self-centered actor, and Sondra the spurned sheriff's deputy. Who will survive? Death comes sudden and silent. The camouflaged killer's weapon of choice is a high-tech hunting bow capable of firing razor-sharp arrows 400 feet per second. The mysterious assassin has an agenda. Those left behind must find out what it is and who is behind this bloody slaughter in the fight for their lives.
©2017 John Shepphird (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Suspended Sentences
Summary
In this essential trilogy of novellas by the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, French author Patrick Modiano reaches back in time, opening the corridors of memory and exploring the mysteries to be encountered there. Each novella in the volume - Afterimage, Suspended Sentences, and Flowers of Ruin - represents a sterling example of the author's originality and appeal, while Mark Polizzotti's superb English-language translations capture not only Modiano's distinctive narrative voice but also the matchless grace and spare beauty of his prose. Although originally published separately, Modiano's three novellas form a single, compelling whole, haunted by the same gauzy sense of place and characters. Modiano draws on his own experiences, blended with the real or invented stories of others, to present a dreamlike autobiography that is also the biography of a place. Orphaned children, mysterious parents, forgotten friends, enigmatic strangers - all appear in this three-part love song to a Paris that no longer exists. Shadowed by the dark period of the Nazi Occupation, these novellas reveal Modiano's fascination with the lost, obscure, or mysterious: a young person's confusion over adult behavior; the repercussions of a chance encounter; the search for a missing father; the aftershock of a fatal affair. To listen to Modiano's trilogy is to enter his world of uncertainties and the almost accidental way in which people find their fates.
©2014 Originally published as Chien de printemps, 1993 by Editions du Seuil; Remise de peine, 1988 by Editions du Seuil; and Fleurs de ruine, 1991 by Editions du Seuil. Translation 2014 by Mark Polizzotti (P)2014 Blackstone Audio, Inc.