Gary Telles

Whitney Balliett's magnificent essay on the Great Hurricane of 1938 appeared in The New Yorker fifty years after the event. This selection is part of the full length audiobook, "Storm: Stories of Survival From Land and Sea."

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,...

"The Only Blasphemy" is an essay from mountaineer legend John Long chronicling his solo ascent at Joshua Tree National Park's Half Dome with climber extraordinaire and childhood friend John Bachar.

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.

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 stories in "Survive" are full of suffering: From the savagery of the Donner Party snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains during the winter of 1846, to the extreme hunger and brutal cold endured by Ernest Shackleton’s support team in Antarctica in 1915. Such suffering may be hard to listen to, but it engages us, offering glimpses of something essential. When the most basic needs become paramount, some people can achieve a kind of clarity....