Audiobooks narrated by Armando Duran

“I Am a Man”: Chief Standing Bear’s Journey for Justice

In 1877, Chief Standing Bear's Ponca Indian tribe was forcibly removed from their Nebraska homeland and marched to Oklahoma-known then as Indian Territory-in what became the tribe's own Trail of Tears. "I Am a Man" chronicles what happened when Standing Bear set off on a six-hundred-mile walk to return the body of his only son to their traditional burial grounds. Along the way, it examines the complex relationship between the United States government and the small, peaceful tribe and the legal consequences of land swaps and broken treaties, while never losing sight of the heartbreaking journey the Ponca endured. It is an account of people left for dead who survived injustice, disease, neglect, starvation, humiliation, and termination. On another level, it is a story of life and death, despair and fortitude, freedom and patriotism; a story of Christian kindness and bureaucratic evil; a story of hope, of a people still among us today, painstakingly preserving a cultural identity that had sustained them for centuries before their encounter with Lewis and Clark in the fall of 1804. Before it ends, Standing Bear's long journey home also explores fundamental issues of citizenship, constitutional protection, cultural identity, and the nature of democracy-issues that continue to resonate loudly in twenty-first-century America. It is a story that questions whether native sovereignty, tribal-based societies, and cultural survival are compatible with American democracy. Standing Bear successfully used habeas corpus, the only liberty included in the original text of the Constitution, to gain access to a federal court and ultimately his freedom. This account aptly illuminates how the nation's delicate system of checks and balances worked almost exactly as the Founding Fathers envisioned, a system arguably out of whack and under siege today. "The painful, moving, inspiring, and important story of Chief Standing Bear has found a worthy chronicler in Joe Starita. This excellent book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the West or of America."-Ian Frazier, New York Times bestselling author of On the Rez and Great Plains

Joe Starita (Author), Armando Duran (Narrator)

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Zama

Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, weirdly archaic and powerfully novel, Zama takes place in the last decade of the eighteenth century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asunción, the capital of remote Paraguay. There, eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, and paranoid fantasies, he does as little as he possibly can while plotting his eventual transfer to Buenos Aires, where everything about his hopeless existence will, he is confident, be miraculously transformed and made good. Don Diego's slow, nightmarish slide into the abyss is not just a tale of one man's perdition but an exploration of existential, and very American, loneliness. Zama, with its stark dreamlike prose and spare imagery, is at once dense and unforeseen, terse and fateful, marked throughout by a haunting movement between sentences, paragraphs, and sections, so that every word seems to emerge from an ocean of things left unsaid. The philosophical depths of this great book spring directly from its dazzling prose.

Antonio Di Benedetto (Author), Armando Duran (Narrator)

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Trouble at Temescal: A Western Duo

A pair of action-packed tall tales from Western master Frank Bonham The first story, Trouble in Temescal, is set in Los Angeles in the days following the Mexican-American War, and tells the tale of two entrepreneurial mustangers, Hank Ashwood and Red Wolfe, who have driven a herd of horses from New Mexico to California for resale. But their efforts to sell the animals to one of the Mexican hacendados, Dona Julia de la Torre, owner of Rancho Temescal, are hampered by a scabrous group of squatters led by Owen Pike, bent on claiming rights to her land, and who have the racially biased ownership laws at their backs. The second story, King of the Defiances, is the story of Big Jim Jackson, who intends to make a fortune by logging off the best railroad-tie timber in Arizona, and his clash with former manhunter Troy Cameron, the leader of a group of small cattle ranchers who stand in Jackson's way. Jackson now holds notes on the ranchers' land and plans to foreclose if the notes aren't met on time. And he has a hired crew of gun hands ready to use force against anyone who resists.

Frank Bonham (Author), Armando Duran, Armando Durán (Narrator)

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The Story of My Teeth

The story of “Highway” Sánchez—bon vivant, world traveler, auctioneer—and his teeth is like Johnny Cash meets Robert Walser in Mexico. “I was born in Pachuca, the Beautiful Windy City, with four premature teeth and my body completely covered in a very fine coat of fuzz. But I’m grateful for that inauspicious start because ugliness, as my other uncle, Eurípides López Sánchez, was given to saying, is character forming.” Gustavo “Highway” Sánchez Sánchez is a late-in-life world traveler, yarn spinner, collector, and legendary auctioneer. His most precious possessions are the teeth of the “notorious infamous,” like Plato, Petrarch, and Virginia Woolf. Written in collaboration with the workers at a Jumex juice factory, The Story of My Teeth is an elegant, witty, exhilarating romp through the industrial suburbs of Mexico City and Luiselli’s own literary influences. “The Story of My Teeth explores the meaning of home through the antics of an auctioneer, told in his own hyperbolic fashion, who has decided views on the meaning of value and worth in life and art.”—BBC.com

Valeria Luiselli (Author), Armando Duran, Thom Rivera (Narrator)

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The Savage Detectives

The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been called the García Márquez of his generation. In this dazzling novel, the book that established his international reputation, Bolaño tells the story of two modern-day Quixotes-the last survivors of an underground literary movement, perhaps of literature itself-on a tragicomic quest through a darkening, entropic universe. Brilliantly rendered into English by Natasha Wimmer, the acclaimed translator of Bolaño's other great masterwork, 2666, The Savage Detectives is an exuberant, wildly inventive, and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age. "The Savage Detectives, which, like 2666, has been translated with wonderful agility by Natasha Wimmer, catapulted [Bolaño] from obscurity to worshipful adulation."-Janet Maslin, New York Times

Roberto Bolaño (Author), Armando Duran, Armando Durán, Eddie Lopez (Narrator)

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The Mark of Zorro

Originally serialized, this exciting adventure story achieved immortal fame thanks to the Douglas Fairbanks film of the same name-a cinematic triumph that inspired author Johnston McCulley to dedicate the book release to Fairbanks. It has since seen numerous film and other adaptations, including Blackstone Audio's full-cast audio drama produced by the renowned Yuri Rasovsky and featuring the voice talents of Val Kilmer. 1820s California, in a bygone era of sprawling haciendas and haughty caballeros, suffers beneath the whip of oppression. Missions are pillaged, native peasants are abused, and innocent men and women are persecuted by the corrupt governor and his army. But a champion of freedom rides the highways. His identity hidden behind a mask, the laughing outlaw Zorro defies the tyrant's might. A deadly marksman and a demon swordsman, his flashing blade strikes down those who exploit the poor and oppressed. First published in 1919, The Mark of Zorro remains a paradigm of swashbuckling adventure and a popular novel to this day. "A succession of thrills from first page to last…Original…Captivating."-Boston Traveler

Johnston McCulley (Author), Armando Duran (Narrator)

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The Drug Lord: The True Story of Pablo Acosta; The Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin

Terrence E. Poppa (Author), Armando Duran, Armando Durán (Narrator)

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The Creed of Violence

Mexico, 1910. The landscape pulses with the force of the upcoming revolution, an atmosphere rich in opportunity for a criminal such as Rawbone. His fortune arrives across the haze of the Sierra Blanca in the form of a truck loaded with weapons. But Rawbone’s plan spins against him, and he soon finds himself at the Mexican-American border and in the hands of the Bureau of Investigation. He is offered a chance for immunity, but only if he agrees to proceed with his scheme to deliver the truck and its goods to the Mexican oil fields while under the command of Agent John Lourdes. Rawbone sees no other option and agrees to the deal—but he fails to recognize the true identity of Agent Lourdes, a man from deep within his past. Set against a backdrop of intrigue and corruption, The Creed of Violence is a saga about the scars of abandonment, the greed of war, and America’s history of foreign intervention for the sake of oil. “A breathless ride along Mexico’s revolutionary road.”—Washington Post

Boston Teran (Author), Armando Duran (Narrator)

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The Captain's Verses: The Love Poems

Pablo Neruda, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, finished writing The Captain's Verses in 1952 while in exile on the island of Capri?the paradisiacal setting for the blockbuster film Il Postino (The Postman). Surrounded by sea, sun, and Capri's natural splendors, Neruda addressed these poems to his lover Matilde Urrutia before they were married, but he didn't publish them publicly until 1963. This complete collection has become a classic for love-struck readers around the world?passionately sensuous and exploding with all the erotic energy of a new love.

Pablo Neruda (Author), Armando Duran (Narrator)

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Spoils

The Kite Runner meets The Things They Carried in this explosive debut which maps the blurred lines between good and bad, soldier and civilian, victor and vanquished. It is April 2003. American forces have taken Baghdad and are now charged with winning hearts and minds. But this vital tipping point is barely recognized for what it is, as a series of miscalculations and blunders fuels an already-simmering insurgency intent on making Iraq the next graveyard of empires. In dazzling and propulsive prose, Brian Van Reet explores the lives on both sides of the battle lines: Cassandra, a nineteen-year-old gunner on an American Humvee who is captured during a deadly firefight and awakens in a prison cell; Abu Al-Hool, a lifelong mujahedeen beset by a simmering crisis of conscience as he struggles against enemies from without and within, including the new wave of far more radicalized jihadists; and Specialist Sleed, a tank crewman who goes along with a "victimless" crime, the consequences of which are more awful than any he could have imagined. Depicting a war spinning rapidly out of control, destined to become a modern classic, Spoils is an unsparing and morally complex novel that chronicles the achingly human cost of combat.

Brian Van Reet (Author), Andrew Eiden, Armando Duran, Nicol Zanzarella (Narrator)

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Spoils

Random House presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Spoils by Brian Van Reet, read by Nicol Zanzarella, Armando Duran and Andrew Eiden. It is the spring of 2003 and coalition forces are advancing on Iraq. Images of a giant statue of Saddam Hussein crashing to the ground in Baghdad are being beamed to news channels around the world. Nineteen-year-old Specialist Cassandra Wigheard, on her first deployment since joining the US army two years earlier, is primed for war. For Abu al-Hool, a jihadist since the days of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, war is wearing thin. Two decades of fighting - and the new wave of super-radicalised fighters joining the ranks in the wake of the September 11 attacks - have left him questioning his commitment to the struggle. When Cassandra is taken prisoner by al-Hool's mujahideen brotherhood, both fighters will find their loyalties tested to the very limits. This fast-paced, hard-hitting account of eight weeks in the lives of a soldier and her captor forces us to reconsider the simplistic narratives of war spun by those in power. With its privileged insight into the reality of armed combat, Spoils shines a light on the uncertainty, fear and idealism that characterised the early days of one of the most important conflicts of our time.

Brian Van Reet (Author), Andrew Eiden, Armando Duran, Nicol Zanzarella (Narrator)

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Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando

Brando is perpetually fascinating, both for the power of the characters he portrayed and for his tumultuous personal life. Bestselling biographer Stefan Kanfer seamlessly intertwines the man and the work to give us the fullest and most illuminating appraisal yet. Kanfer takes us from Brando's troubled childhood to his arrival in New York in the 1940s, where he studied with the legendary Stella Adler and became, at age twenty-three, the star of Broadway in A Streetcar Named Desire. He looks at each of Brando's films, offering a detailed analysis of his performances that shows the evolution of Brando's singular genius. He brings into focus Brando's self-destructiveness, his ambivalence toward his craft, and the tragedies that shadowed his last years. What emerges is a definitive life of an iconic artist whose work forever altered the landscape of his craft.

Stefan Kanfer (Author), Armando Duran (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Armando Duran