Showing results by narrator "Nick Landrum" in All Categories

For almost 40 years, from its genesis in 1967 to its eventual live unveiling at London's Royal Festival Hall in 2004, the album SMiLE has been written into music mythology. SMiLE: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Brian Wilson documents the history of the album, drawing on interviews with collaborator Van Dyke Parks, Brian's band (especially Darian Sahanaja), close friends, family, and many others who were part of its story.

With a career spanning over fifty years, Tom Waits remains one of rock’s great enigmas; a chameleon-like survivor who, like Bob Dylan and Neil Young, has achieved long-term success while retaining cult credibility and outsider mystique. Lowside of the Road, by Barney Hoskyns, offers a unique, affectionate and penetrating portrait of Waits spanning from Closing Time to Orphans, and beyond. Based on extensive research and deep critical insight, Hoskyns' definitive account of Waits' life and work is an outstanding exploration of this notoriously private artist and performer.

This nationally best-selling novel from Pulitzer Prize-winner Jeffrey Eugenides was adapted into an acclaimed film by Academy Award-winner Sofia Coppola. A haunting yet wickedly funny tale, The Virgin Suicides has captivated countless readers with its intoxicating portrait of lost innocence. A brilliant fusion of dark humor and tragedy, it is an atmospheric, allegorical masterpiece about five oppressed, suicidal sisters and the boys who dream of rescuing them.

The classic account of the LA Canyons scene between 1967 and 1976, featuring Joni Mitchell; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young; The Eagles; James Taylor; and Jackson Browne. Ambition, betrayal, drugs and genius all combine with great music making.

US Marshal Raylan Givens is back in action, with a federal warrant to serve on a dope dealer named Angel Arenas. The state troopers are impressed when the marshal struts into the convict's hotel room without drawing his gun, but Raylan soon finds that Angel's already been the victim of another crime; one that's way bigger than a bit of pot, and clearly the work of a professional...

Patrick Bateman is 26 and works on Wall Street. He is handsome, sophisticated, charming, and intelligent. He is also a psychopath. And he is taking us to a head-on collision with America's greatest dream - and its worst nightmare...

God takes a look at the Earth around the time of the Renaissance, and everything looks pretty good - so he takes a holiday. In heaven time this is just a week's fishing trip, but on Earth several hundred years go by. When God returns, he finds all hell has broken loose: world wars, holocausts, famine, capitalism and "fucking Christians everywhere". There's only one thing for it. They're sending the kid back. JC, reborn, is a struggling musician in New York City, trying to teach the one true commandment: be nice!

When NYPD detective Callum Doyle’s partner is murdered, and then his replacement is also brutally killed, suspicion falls on Doyle himself. Then he receives an anonymous message: This is just the beginning. Anyone he gets close to will die - and that includes his family. Desperate to find out who is responsible, but with his every move putting others in danger, Doyle has to ask himself: how low would he sink in order to get his life back?

This new series opens a new chapter in the Shannara legend. This is the story of the events before those described in The Sword of Shannara. Here begins the chronicle of the Great Wars and the destruction of the Old World, the story of how one world was destroyed and another created. This is the most ambitious project Terry Brooks has undertaken in his remarkable career, a series that will delight and amaze his existing fans and attract a whole new generation of readers.

It’s every mother’s nightmare - the abduction of her baby. That’s how it starts for Erin Vogel when she is attacked and left unconscious in her apartment. When she awakes it is to find that Georgia, her six-month-old daughter, has been taken. But Erin is given a chance to get Georgia back. At an unthinkable price. Like most mothers, she has always said she would do anything for her child. Now the strength of that bond is about to be put to the ultimate test.

After a grisly murder in a shabby New York bookstore, Detective Callum Doyle starts receiving sinister phone calls. Doyle is told more deaths are planned but the caller will give him clues, on the condition that he keeps them to himself. As more vicious deaths follow, the pressure on Doyle to find a link becomes unbearable. Does he continue to gamble with people’s lives? Or should he sacrifice everything to defeat a ruthless and manipulative enemy?

From the author of The Perfect Storm and War comes a book about why men miss war, why Londoners missed the Blitz, and what we can all learn from American Indian captives who refused to go home. Tribe is a look at post-traumatic stress disorder and the challenges veterans face in returning to society. Using his background in anthropology, Sebastian Junger argues that the problem lies not with vets or with the trauma they've suffered but with the society to which they are trying to return.

One of the great chase novels, The Night of the Hunter centres on the ferocious, unforgettable figure of Preacher, a psychopath who relentlessly pursues two children who may or may not know the secret of where the money from a bank raid is hidden. Set in a brilliantly rendered Depression-era American river town, Grubb's novel is both a study of innocence and evil and a savage picture of human failings as, one by one, the adults who have it in their power to protect the children fall for Preacher's wiles.

Harry Arno runs a South Miami Beach gambling operation. To protect his position, he was forced to cut a deal with the local muscle, Jimmy Capotorto (Jumbo Jimmy Cap), an even fifty-fifty split. For years Harry had been padding his own stake by skimming off the top. Now a couple of local detectives - wise to sticky fingers - try to bag Jimmy by putting the squeeze on Harry. U.S. Marshalls deliver Harry to court to testify at Jimmy's trial. Even though he's a step slower than he used to be, Harry's no fool - he slips out of the country pronto.

Teenager Vernon Gregory Little's life has been changed by the Columbine-style slaughter of a group of students at his high school. Soon his hole-in-the-wall town is blanketed under a media siege, and Vernon finds himself blamed for the killing. Eulalio Ledesma is his particular nemesis, manipulating things so that Vernon becomes the fulcrum for the bizarre and vengeful impulses of the townspeople of Martirio.

Collecting money for the Mob isn't too different from any other job, reckons Miami loan shark Chili Palmer. He soon finds himself ordered to collect on a bad debt from Leo Devoe, a guy who died in a plane crash. But it turns out Leo isn't dead - he's living it up in Las Vegas on the compensation money. So Chili follows him to Vegas and then on to Hollywood, where he gets drawn into the world of movies....

This powerful and brilliant literary novel takes a character who, through Peter Benchley’s novel and particularly Steven Spielberg’s film, has become etched in our cultural imagination: Quint, the taciturn and grizzled sea captain who survived the shark-ridden sinking of the USS Indianapolis only to meet his end in the maw of a Great White at the end of JAWS.

When Paul enters university in early 1970s Pittsburgh, it’s with the hope of moving past the recent death of his father. Sensitive, insecure and like a stranger to his family, Paul feels isolated and alone. When he meets the worldly Julian in his freshman ethics class, Paul is immediately drawn to his classmate’s effortless charm. Paul will stop at nothing to prove himself worthy of their friendship. But Julian is as volatile and cruel as he is charismatic, and Paul begins to suspect that he can never live up to what Julian expects of him.

Saqqara, Egypt, 1888. Rom, a young Egyptologist, makes the discovery of a lifetime: five coffins and an eerie, oversized sarcophagus. But the expedition seems cursed; after unearthing the mummies, all but Rom die horribly. He faithfully returns to America with his disturbing cargo, continuing by train to his reclusive sponsor. When the train is hijacked in the Arizona desert by murderous banditos, who steal his cargo and flee to Mexico, Rom - his benefactor’s rebellious daughter, an orphaned Chinese busboy, and a cold-blooded gunslinger - must go to Mexico to retrieve the mummies.

When the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan in 2016, the literary world was up in arms. How could the world's most prestigious book prize be awarded to a famously cantankerous singer-songwriter in his 70s, who wouldn't even deign to make a victory speech? In Why Dylan Matters, Harvard professor Richard F. Thomas answers that question with magisterial erudition.