Thom Rivera

A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With her trademark blend of humor and melancholy, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday--uncovering moments of grace in the cafeterias and Laundromats of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Northern California upper classes, and from the perspective of a cleaning woman alone in a hotel dining room in Mexico City. The women of Berlin's stories...

Detective Jimmy Vega has his hands full when the disappearance of a teenage girl in upstate New York sets off a powder keg of accusations, bigotry and fear--with deadly results.

"It's spring in Lake Holly, New York, a time of hope and renewal. But not for immigrants in this picturesque upstate town. Raids and deportations are on the rise, spurring fear throughout the community. Tensions reach the boiling point when the district attorney's beautiful young bride is found hanging in her flooded basement, an apparent victim of suicide. But is she, wonders police detective Jimmy Vega? If so, where is her undocumented immigrant...

"Bon vivant, world traveler, auctioneer--the story of Highway and his teeth is like Johnny Cash meets Robert Walser in Mexico"--

A personal and engaging tribute to nature from a world-famous theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser has had a passion for science and fishing since he was a boy growing up on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. As a world-famous theoretical physicist with hundreds of scientific articles and several books of popular science to his credit, he felt it was time to once again connect with nature in less theoretical ways. After seeing a fly-fishing class on...

Describes how Miguel de Cervantes found refuge from his childhood troubles by daydreaming of a brave knight who would right the wrongs of the world, the inspiration for his famous character Don Quixote.

Laid off from his job, Damián Lobo obsessively imagines himself as a celebrity being interviewed on TV. After committing an act of petty theft at an antique market, he finds himself trapped inside a wardrobe and delivered to the seemingly idyllic home of a husband, a wife, and their internet-addicted teenage daughter. There, he sneaks from the shadows to serve as an invisible butler, becoming deeply and disastrously involved with his unknowing host...

In How We Disappear, award-winning author Tara Lynn Masih offers listeners transporting and compelling stories of those taken, those missing, and those neither here nor gone - runaways, exiles, wanderers, ghosts, even the elusive Dame Agatha Christie. From the remote Siberian taiga to the harsh American frontier, from rural Long Island to postwar Belgium, Masih's characters are diverse in identity and circumstance, defying the burden of erasure by...