59 Results for : mordant

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    Black and White and Dead All Over , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 733min
    A keenly intelligent, delightfully mordant novel that blends fact and fiction with the same deft hand that was at work in John Darnton's best-selling Neanderthal.It opens in the inner sanctums of the New York Globe, the city's long-standing newspaper of note, whose back is to the wall. Readership, advertising, and circulation are plummeting - along with the paper's vaunted standards - and the cost cutters have their knives out.But trouble of a wholly different kind begins one rainy September morning when a powerful editor is found murdered in the newsroom, with the spike that he'd wielded to kill stories hammered into his chest. And the problem for Priscilla Bollingsworth, the young, ambitious female NYPD detective assigned to the case - besides the fact that the mayor is breathing down her neck - is that there are so many suspects to choose from.She teams up with Jude Hurley, a clever, rebellious reporter, to navigate ink-infested waters whose denizens include the paper's resentful old guard, scheming careerists, a bumbling publisher, a steely executive editor, and a ruthless newspaper tycoon named Lester Moloch. And the waters thicken considerably when more bodies turn up, dead all over.With the firsthand knowledge he acquired over 40 years in journalism, John Darnton conjures up the cynicism and romanticism of the profession and gives us a cunning, pitch-perfect portrait of the declining - if not yet murderous - newspaper industry within a mystery that entertains from first to last. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Phil Gigante. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/brll/000447/bk_brll_000447_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.
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    Double Feature: A Novel , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 972min
    An epic debut novel about a young man coming to terms with his life in the process and aftermath of making his first film - from critically acclaimed short story writer Owen King - for listeners of Joshua Ferris, Sam Lipsyte, and Chad Harbach. Filmmaker Sam Dolan has a difficult relationship with his father, B-movie actor Booth Dolan - a boisterous, opinionated, lying lothario whose screen legacy falls somewhere between cult hero and pathetic. Allie, Sam’s dearly departed mother, was a woman whose only fault, in Sam’s eyes, was her eternal affection for his father. Also included in the cast of indelible characters: a precocious, frequently violent half-sister; a conspiracy-theorist second wife; an Internet-famous roommate; a family friend and contractor who can’t stop expanding his house; a happy-go-lucky college girlfriend and her husband, a retired Yankees catcher; the morose producer of a true crime show; and a slouching indie film legend. Not to mention a tragic sex monster. Unraveling the tumultuous, decades-spanning story of the Dolan family’s friends, lovers, and adversaries, Double Feature is about letting go of everything - regret, resentment, ambition, dignity, moving pictures, the dead - and taking it again from the top. Combining propulsive storytelling and mordant wit against the backdrop of indie filmmaking, Double Feature brims with a deep understanding of the trials of ambition and art, of relationships and life, and of our attempts to survive it all. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Holter Graham. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/sans/006290/bk_sans_006290_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.
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    Cartwheel: A Novel , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 865min
    Written with the riveting storytelling and moral seriousness of authors like Emma Donoghue, Adam Johnson, Ann Patchett, and Curtis Sittenfeld, Cartwheel is a suspenseful and haunting novel of an American foreign exchange student arrested for murder, and a father trying to hold his family together. When Lily Hayes arrives in Buenos Aires for her semester abroad, she is enchanted by everything she encounters: the colorful buildings, the street food, the handsome, elusive man next door. Her studious roommate Katy is a bit of a bore, but Lily didn't come to Argentina to hang out with other Americans. Five weeks later, Katy is found brutally murdered in their shared home, and Lily is the prime suspect. But who is Lily Hayes? It depends on who's asking. As the case takes shape - revealing deceptions, secrets, and suspicious DNA - Lily appears alternately sinister and guileless through the eyes of those around her: the media, her family, the man who loves her and the man who seeks her conviction. With mordant wit and keen emotional insight, Cartwheel offers a prismatic investigation of the ways we decide what to see - and to believe - in one another and ourselves. In Cartwheel, duBois delivers a novel of propulsive psychological suspense and rare moral nuance. No two readers will agree who Lily is and what happened to her roommate. Cartwheel will keep you guessing until the final page, and its questions about how well we really know ourselves will linger well beyond. A pick for The Millions' Most Anticipated Books of 2013  ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Emily Rankin. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/rand/003632/bk_rand_003632_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.
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    A Widow's Story: A Memoir , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 894min
    In a work unlike anything she's written before, National Book Award-winner Joyce Carol Oates unveils a poignant, intimate memoir about the unexpected death of her husband of 46 years and its wrenching, surprising aftermath. "My husband died, my life collapsed." On a February morning in 2008, Joyce Carol Oates drove her ailing husband, Raymond Smith, to the emergency room of the Princeton Medical Center, where he was diagnosed with pneumonia. Both Joyce and Ray expected him to be released in a day or two. But in less than a week, even as Joyce was preparing for his discharge, Ray died from a virulent hospital-acquired infection, and Joyce was suddenly faced - totally unprepared - with the stunning reality of widowhood. A Widow's Story illuminates one woman's struggle to comprehend a life without the partnership that had sustained and defined her for nearly half a century. As never before, Joyce Carol Oates shares the derangement of denial, the anguish of loss, the disorientation of the survivor amid a nightmare of "death-duties", and the solace of friendship. She writes unflinchingly of the experience of grief - the almost unbearable suspense of the hospital vigil, the treacherous "pools" of memory that surround us, the vocabulary of illness, the absurdities of commercialized forms of mourning. Here is a frank acknowledgment of the widow's desperation, only gradually yielding to the recognition that "this is my life now." Enlivened by the piercing vision, acute perception, and mordant humor that are the hallmarks of the work of Joyce Carol Oates, this moving tale of life and death, love and grief, offers a candid, never-before-glimpsed view of the acclaimed author and fiercely private woman. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Ellen Parker. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/harp/002419/bk_harp_002419_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.
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    Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 526min
    A wildly inventive new collection of stories by Joyce Carol Oates that charts the surprising ways in which the world we think we know can unexpectedly reveal its darker contours.... The New York Times has hailed Joyce Carol Oates as "a dangerous writer in the best sense of the word, one who takes risks almost obsessively with energy and relish."Black Dahlia & White Rose, a collection of 11 previously uncollected stories, showcases the keen rewards of Oates's relentless brio and invention. In one beautifully honed story after another, Oates explores the menace that lurks at the edges of and intrudes upon even the seemingly safest of lives - and maps with rare emotional acuity the transformational cost of such intrusions. Unafraid to venture into no-man's-lands both real and surreal, Oates takes readers deep into dangerous territory, from a maximum-security prison - vividly delineating the heartbreaking and unexpected atmosphere of such an institution - to the inner landscapes of two beautiful and mysteriously doomed young women in 1940s Los Angeles: Elizabeth Short, otherwise known as the Black Dahlia, victim of a long-unsolved and particularly brutal murder, and her roommate Norma Jeane Baker, soon to become Marilyn Monroe. Whether exploring the psychological compulsion of the wife of a well-to-do businessman who is ravished by, and elopes with, a lover who is not what he seems, or the uneasily duplicitous relationships between young women and their parents, Black Dahlia & White Rose explores the compelling intertwining of dread and desire, the psychic pull and trauma of domestic life, and resonates at every turn with Oates's mordant humor and her trenchant observation. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Paul Michael Garcia, Coleen Marlo, Tavia Gilbert. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/harp/003104/bk_harp_003104_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.
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    Atmospheres , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 346min
    No plot summary can suggest the mesmerizing texture of this caustically hilarious, aggressively mordant, constantly surprising and terrifyingly fun summation of the death-by-choking-on-hubris of the American dream in the 21st century. An unconventional abstract experiment depicting the elusive search for meaning within a chaotic world on the verge of collapse, this challenge to listeners presents a mosaic of nightmarish, post-modern prose in the form of a non-linear novel exploring the existential definition of life. Quickly unfolding into a wildly imaginative world of death metal, serial killers, absurd cultural references, and sketches involving cough syrup abuse, post-apocalyptic chaos, and self-fulfillment through drone warfare, the book explores a descent into chemical imbalance and sexual horror. Rendered in several narrative forms, the 101 disconnected pieces within this three-act novel forms a psychedelic story arc spanning the journey of the narrator to find the meaning of life within a near-future filled with chaos and destruction, to mine the depths of his nostalgia and explore the far reaches of the imagination to find satiation and serenity that no amount of sex, drugs, money, power, fame, therapy, or consumer electronics could touch. Dodging from past to present to future, Konrath's writing often goes meta and breaks the fourth wall, varying from between painfully honest personal narrative and grotesque dark fiction. Atmospheres is as unnerving as it is enthralling, and is more disturbing than a cutthroat gang of genetically engineered Franz Kafka clones who've been spawned in petri dishes filled with PCP and fecal matter showing up at your door wearing Reagan masks and polyester leisure suits, wrestling in a wading pool filled with viscera and tapioca pudding. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Rob Shamblin. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/024380/bk_acx0_024380_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.
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    In My Dreams I Hold a Knife
    "[A] mordant debut novel....examines what it means to covet the lives of others, no matter the cost."-The New York Times "Tense, twisty, and packed with shocks."-Riley Sager, New York Times bestselling author of Survive The Night Six friends. One college reunion. One unsolved murder. Ten years after graduation, Jessica Miller has planned her triumphant return to her southern, elite Duquette University, down to the envious whispers that are sure to follow in her wake. Everyone is going to see the girl she wants them to see-confident, beautiful, indifferent. Not the girl she was when she left campus, back when Heather Shelby's murder fractured everything, including the tight bond linking the six friends she'd been closest to since freshman year. But not everyone is ready to move on. Not everyone left Duquette ten years ago, and not everyone can let Heather's murder go unsolved. Someone is determined to trap the real killer, to make the guilty pay. When the six friends are reunited, they will be forced to confront what happened that night-and the years' worth of secrets each of them would do anything to keep hidden. Told in racing dual timelines, with a dark campus setting and a darker look at friendship, love, obsession, and ambition, In My Dreams I Hold A Knife is an addictive, propulsive read you won't be able to put down. "Beautiful writing, juicy secrets, complex female characters, and drumbeat suspense-what more could you want from a debut thriller?"-Andrea Bartz, author of Reese's Book Club pick We Were Never Here
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    • Price: 23.99 EUR excl. shipping
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    Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 616min
    In Cyberselfish Borsook journeys through and rants about high tech culture, profiling the worlds of ravers, gilders, cypherpunks, anarcho-capitalists, and other Silicon Valley life forms, and exploring the theory and practice of technolibertarianism in all its manifestations. She visits the Bionomics Institute, a libertarian thinktank, to explore how its para/pseudo/crypto "biological" thinking pervades high tech discourse on technology, economics, and life. She journeys to the front lines of the "crypto wars" to explain why cryptography has been such an important issue to both the U.S. government and the high tech community. She deconstructs Wired, the magazine that defined an era, and shows how many high tech thought leaders have at least one foot in the philosophies and misogyny of days long gone by. She also investigates the perplexing dilemma of philanthropy in high tech, exposing how little of the billions generated in the new economy filters into our culture at large, and defining what she calls the "cat-dead-rat" phenomenon, whereby high tech give unto the world the thing it loves, not necessarily what the world wants or needs. Finally, she examines the factors that have led to technolibertarianism, and wonders aloud about the extent to which high tech's creativity and energy and money and contributions to our general welfare are undermined by its self-centered politically myopic worldview.Whether she is parsing Silicon Valley personal ads, hanging out with high tech gurus, attending conferences-cum-rallies or exposing the flaws in technolibertarian thinking, Borsook is full of original observations, mordant wit, and furious passion that readers wake up to the social and political consequences of having computer geeks run the world. Cyberselfish is sure to raise the hackles of high techies and to clarify what makes the rest of us so nervous about the brave new cyberworld. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Paula Parker. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/rhau/000029/bk_rhau_000029_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.
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    Cosmopolitan: A Bartender's Life, Hörbuch, Digital, 148min
    Cosmopolitan: A Bartender's Life is a memoir of the bartending life structured as a day in the life at Passerby, the bar owned and run by Toby Cecchini. It is, as well, a rich study of human nature, of the sometimes annoying, sometimes outlandish behavior of the human animal under the influence of alcohol, lust and the sheer desire to bust loose and party. It's not a pretty picture, but it's always compelling through the gimlet-eyed gaze of the author. As his typical day progresses, from the almost pastoral quiet of opening the bar and setting up to the gathering rush of customers dropping in after work to the sheer madness of catering to a crazed crush of funseekers, Toby Cecchini muses over a life spent in the service industry and the fascinating particulars of his chosen profession. Topics touched on include dealing with regulars, both welcome and not; sex and the bartender; cocktail connoisseurs (and drinks he refuses to make); learning the bartending ropes of the Odeon when young and newly arrived in New York; the sheer man-killing pace of keeping those drinks coming at flood tide; and the manifold varieties of weirdness and bad behavior that every bartender has to learn how to manage. Of particular cultural interest is the author's account of his reinvention of the Cosmopolitan when he bartended at Odeon and his dismay as the drink went on to be bastardized by many thousands of bartenders and became a highly dubious indicator of urban sophistication. Cosmopolitan is the hip, behind-the-scenes look at the frenzied and undeniably fun atmosphere of that great establishment, the bar. It does for bartenders what Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential did for chefs. Toby Cecchini is, by turns, witty, acute, mordant and lyrical in dealing with the realities of his job, shedding plenty of light on the hidden corners of what people do when they go out at night. Language: English. Narrator: Toby Cecchini. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/rand/000328/bk_rand_000328_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.
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    The Idiot , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 820min
    A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself. The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings. At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer. With superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of tenderness and wisdom, its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of memory itself. The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Batuman's fiction is unguarded against both life's affronts and its beauty - and has at its command the complete range of thinking and feeling that they entail. ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Elif Batuman. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/peng/003052/bk_peng_003052_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.
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