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In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.

As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.

Ernest Hemingway, a literary icon and considered one of the greatest American writers of all time, is the subject of a major documentary by award-winning filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. This intimate portrait of Hemingway – who brilliantly captured the complexities of the human condition in spare and profound prose, and whose work remains deeply influential in literature and culture – interweaves a close study of biographical events with excerpts from his work.

The Hemingway Stories features Hemingway’s most significant short stories in chronological order, so viewers of the film as well as fans old and new can follow the trajectory of his impressive life and career. Hemingway’s beloved classics, such as “The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, “Up in Michigan”, “Indian Camp”, and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, are accompanied by fresh insights from renowned writers around the world – Mario Vargas Llosa, Edna O’Brien, Abraham Verghese, Tim O’Brien, and Mary Karr. Tobias Wolff’s introduction adds a new perspective to Hemingway’s work, and Wolff has selected additional stories that demonstrate Hemingway’s talent and range.

The power of Ernest Hemingway’s revolutionary style is perhaps most striking in his short stories, and here listeners can encounter the tales that created the legend: stories of men and women in love and in war and on the hunt, stories of a lost generation born into a fractured time. Featuring the voices of Mary Karr, Edna O’Brien, Michael Katakis, and other authors whose insights are heard in the PBS documentary, this audio collection is a perfect introduction for a new generation of Hemingway listeners and a vital volume for any fan.

Wisecracking, inquisitive, and bombastic, Selam Asmelash is the youngest child in her large, boisterous family. Even before she is born, she has a wry, bewitching omniscience that animates life in her Small Town in southwestern Ethiopia in the 1980s. Selam and her father listen to the radio in secret as the socialist military junta that recently overthrew the government seizes properties and wages civil war in the North. The Asmelashes, once an enterprising, land-owning family, are ostracized under the new regime. In the Small Town where they live, nosy women convene around coffee ceremonies multiple times a day, the gossip spreading like wildfire.

As Selam’s mother, the powerful and relentlessly dignified Degitu, grows ill, she embraces a persecuted, Pentecostal God and insists her family convert alongside her. The Asmelashes stand solidly in opposition to the times, and Selam grows up seeking revenge on despotic comrades, neighborhood bullies, and a ruthless God. Wise beyond her years yet thoroughly naive, she contends with an inner fury, a profound sadness, and a throbbing, unstoppable pursuit of education, freedom, and love.

Told through the perspective of its charming and irresistible narrator, The History of a Difficult Child is about what happens when mother, God, and country are at odds, and how one difficult child finds her voice.

Seconds before Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor.

Together, this dynamic pair begin a journey through space aided by a galaxyful of fellow travelers: Zaphod Beeblebrox—the two-headed, three-armed ex-hippie and totally out-to-lunch president of the galaxy; Trillian (formerly Tricia McMillan), Zaphod’s girlfriend, whom Arthur tried to pick up at a cocktail party once upon a time zone; Marvin, a paranoid, brilliant, and chronically depressed robot; and Veet Voojagig, a former graduate student obsessed with the disappearance of all the ballpoint pens he’s bought over the years.

Where are these pens? Why are we born? Why do we die? For all the answers, stick your thumb to the stars!