Gary Telles

Tim Cahill's adventures typically include equal parts farce and discovery. "Cahill Among The Ruins of Peru" is no exception. Here Cahill sets out to find undiscovered pre-Incan ruins in northeatern Peru. Oily beaueaucrats, superstitious locals, a know-it-all companion and the Peruvian wilderness did not daunt him. Though they were annoying. This selection is part of the full length audiobook, "Explore: Stories of Survival From Off The Map."

Journalist Frederic Dannen reports on the questionable close relationship between a mobster/informant and an F.B.I. agent during a bloody Colombo crime family battle. This selection is part of the full-length audiobook, "Mob: Stories of Death and Betrayal From Organized Crime."

In "The Green Arch," mountaineer and author John Long offers vivid descriptions of ascending the west face of Tahquitz Rock--a granite, 8,846-foot-tall rock formation located on the high western slope of the San Jacinto mountain range in Southern California--as a teenager with his childhood climbing friends.

Cannibalism In The Cars is a short story by Mark Twain which satires the political system of the US. The story is about a group of men trapped in a train during a snow storm. After a week, the men know that they must resort to cannibalism for survival. They hold ineffective elections, and are so formal that they even follow parliamentary procedure. The ridiculousness of these election can be shown through the following quote: "...Mr. Harris was elected,...

Navy SEAL unit Mobile 4 does not exist. The U.S. military does not acknowledge them. The White House has never heard of them. And no one who has ever seen them in action has lived to tell about them... Lt. Robert Getts heads a combat team of hard-edged raw recruits from the best of the armed services that will launch a search-and-destroy mission that will pit his SEAL team against the most remorseless killer the world has ever seen...

Daniel Zalewski's essay "Once In The Jungle" chronicles American Tobias Schneebaum, a painter-turned adventurer who hitchhiked to Peru, walked into the Amazon jungle and came to live with an isolated native Indian tribe, the Arakmbut people, for seven months in 1956, and his defining moment of participating in cannibalism.

Amy Waters Yarsinske, a former intelligence officer and Pulitzer Prize-nominated author, breaks the incredible true story of Lt. Comdr. Michael Scott Speicher, the first American pilot shot down during the Gulf War, found alive in Iraqi custody eleven years after the US government left him for dead. On January 16, 1991, Speicher participated in the initial air strike of the Persian Gulf War. Moments after an attack by an Iraqi MIG-25, Speicher's...

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American humorist, satirist, lecturer and writer. Twain is most noted for his novels, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which has since been called the Great American Novel, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He is also known for his quotations. During his lifetime, Twain became a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists and European royalty. Here are two of his best stories,...

Most people associate storms and other big weather with death—with the kind of force that makes each of us wonder about life, and time and the nature of our surroundings. Some people go out looking for bad weather or go to places where they’re likely to encounter it. Others have the misfortune of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Still, the stories in Storm have more to say than that. They tell us about what happens when people find...

The Mafia. La Cosa Nostra. The underground, and often not-so-underground, organization and syndicate of criminal activity that has been a part of American history for the past century. Forget television and movies, hear the true stories of the inner workings of his chaotic, violent, and surprisingly human world, a world of respect, tradition, and honor.