A dark secret hides in the swirling dust and exultant revelry of Burning Man. Asha Amarasuriya is bored and struggling to get by as a martial arts instructor in Oakland. When an enigmatic seductress offers her a golden ticket, Asha decides to take a leap of faith and head to Burning Man. But there is more than meets the eye at the infamous desert pilgrimage and Asha gets sucked into a quest to unravel a sinister mystery at the heart of Black Rock City. Will Asha and her friends survive to expose the shadowy conspiracy? By the time the Man burns, their lives will have changed forever.
On a blistering summer day, a bank robbery goes wrong, resulting in the deaths of all the hostages except Treva Williams. Pittsburgh psychologist and trauma expert Daniel Rinaldi is called in by the police to treat Treva. Soon an unforeseen series of events plunges the investigating officers, Sergeant Harry Polk, Detective Eleanor Lowrey, and Rinaldi into a vortex of mistaken identity, kidnapping, and surprising revelations about District Attorney Leland Sinclair's gubernatorial campaign. Is Sinclair somehow involved in the bank case? Rinaldi's attention is diverted by the suicide of a young patient and his growing attraction to Eleanor, as the recently-divorced Harry Polk spirals into an alcohol-driven, self-destructive free-fall. Then sudden death threats against Sinclair fuel a new frenzy of accusations and political maneuvering, and Rinaldi begins to make connections. Soon, what he knows - or thinks he knows - will pull him toward a shocking and possibly lethal confrontation.
"This lyrical testament to life as 'a blind date with mercy' will challenge and inspire."--Publishers Weekly [Starred Review] In 1991, when he was 13 years old, Lenny Duncan stepped out of his house in West Philadelphia, walked to the Greyhound station, and bought a ticket--the start of his great American adventure. Today Duncan, who inspired and challenged audiences with his breakout first book, Dear Church, brings us a deeply personal story about growing up Black and queer in the U.S. In his characteristically powerful voice he recounts hitchhiking across the country, spending time in solitary confinement, battling for sobriety, and discovering a deep faith, examining pressing issues like poverty, mass incarceration, white supremacy, and LGBTQ inclusion through an intimate portrayal of his life's struggles and joys. United States of Grace is a love story about America, revealing the joy and resilience of those places in this country many call "the margins" but that Lenny Duncan has called home. This book makes the bold claim that God is present with us in the most difficult of circumstances, bringing life out of death.
Valyntina Grenier's FEVER DREAM / FEVER DREAM marks a poetic "double debut" with a tête-bêche chapbook, two titles bound upside-down with two front covers, which can be read from either side. With subtle humor, word play, and linguistic inventions, Grenier has written a surprising tour de force...
INSIDE THE WORLD OF MIXED MARTIAL ARTS - AND MURDER... Angel Dare went into Witness Protection to escape her past -- not as a porn star, but as a killer who took down the sex slavery ring that destroyed her life. But sometimes the past just won't stay buried. When a former co-staris gunned down, it's up to Angel to get his son, a hotheaded MMA fighter, safely through the unforgiving Arizona desert, shady Mexican bordertowns, and the seductive neon mirage of Las Vegas...
Video games have captivated us for over 50 years, giving us entire worlds to explore, new ways to connect with friends, thought-provoking stories, or just a fun way to pass the time. Creating games is a dream for many, but making great games is challenging. The Game Designer's Playbook is about meeting that challenge. More specifically, it's a book about game interaction design; in other words, shaping what players can do and how they do it to make a game satisfying and memorable. Our time with a game is built on interaction, from basic things like pushing buttons on a controller, to making complicated strategic decisions and engaging with the narrative. If you've ever felt the adrenaline rush from beating a perfectly tuned boss fight or been delighted by the fanfare of picking up that last collectible, you've experienced good interaction design firsthand. The Game Designer's Playbook is about learning what makes for great (or terrible!) interaction design in games, exploring things like controls, feedback, story, and tutorial design by analyzing existing games. It also looks at how newer and still-developing tech like VR and streaming are changing the ways we play, and how you can bring great interaction design to your own games.
Seven years ago, Sebastian Munro changed his life immensely by transitioning and starting a graduate degree at the University of Ottawa. Now that his degree—and his cash flow—has run its course, however, he finds himself on a Greyhound bus back to his suburban town outside of Toronto in early 2006. Though his high school friends are well aware of his transition, many have yet to see Sebastian face-to-face. Instead of dreading the reunion, Sebastian looks forward to it—until his parents announce their divorce, his former best friend won’t speak to him, and he realizes he has become a stranger in a place that was once so familiar. Rather than returning to Ottawa, he is forced to stay in Durham Region when he witnesses a crime at the local restaurant run by a family friend. Until the trial finishes, and until an academic job comes through, Sebastian must learn to stay exactly where he is—whether he now wants to or not. When he reaches out to his former best friend’s older brother, Garrison, their budding relationship shapes and changes everything Sebastian thought he knew about his previous life, secret identities, and the power of home. Now that Sebastian has found a way to survive in his hometown as the person he always knew himself to be, he realizes he faces a decision especially as an academic job opportunity emerges. Does he continue with his new fantasy life in his hometown, thereby leaving his former academic and trans community aside—or does he go back to the life that made him who he is now and leave his family and friends one more time?
A collection of stories about the outsiders - the criminals, the soldiers, the addicts, the mathematicians, the gamblers and the cage fighters, the refugees and the rebels. From the battlefield to alternate realities to the mean streets of the dark city, we walk in the shoes of those who struggle to survive in a neon-saturated, tech-noir future. Twelve hard-edged stories from the dark, often violent, sometimes strange heart of cyberpunk, this collection - as with all the best science fiction - is an exploration of who were are now. In the tradition of Dashiell Hammett, Philip K Dick, and David Mitchell, Neon Leviathan is a remarkable debut collection from a breakout new author. "Haunting and iridescent--combines the paranoid weirdness of the best Philip K Dick, the chilly but cool-as-fuck future gleam of cyberpunk, and an achingly beautiful literary inflection reminiscent of mainstream heavyweights like Murakami or Ishiguro. T. R. Napper's futures feel at once gritty and vertiginous and close-focus human in the way only the best SF can manage. Whatever roadmap he's working from, I can't wait to see where he's taking us next." Richard Morgan, author of Altered Carbon "It is easier to write about violence than to write about the aftermath--the grief, the guilt, the long-held trauma. It's easier to write about the shouted argument than the taut silence which follows it. It's easier to write about dreamlike unreality than it is to invest a reader in the mundane and the everyday. And yet the stories within Neon Leviathan balance all these competing demands with a deft and masterful hand." Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of Children of Time "Heartbreaking... it evokes the depth of Chinese history, the successive wars, the poetry that expresses both the love of the landscape and the pain of the soldier leaving home, perhaps never to return." (for Dark on a Darkling Earth) Lois Tilton, Locus Magazine "T. R. Napper's cyberpunk story is a standout [in the collection], featuring a download with the tension of a high-speed chase" (for Twelve Minutes to Vinh Quang) Publisher's Weekly "The story is by turns blackly funny, speculatively impressive, and bleakly moving." (for A Strange Loop) Rich Horton, Locus Magazine "Wonderfully strange" (for An Advanced Guide to Successful Price-Fixing in Extra-Terrestrial Betting Markets) Sci Fi Review "Darkly gonzoid" (for An Advanced Guide to Successful Price-Fixing in Extra-Terrestrial Betting Markets) Lois Tilton, Locus Magazine "Thrilling and Moving" (for Ghosts of a Neon God) Rocket Stack Rank "The whole reads like a fever dream" (for Great Buddhist Monk Beat Down) Tangent Online
Altered Carbon and The Wind-Up Girl meet Apocalypse Now in this award-winning, fast-paced, intelligent, action-driven cyberpunk, probing questions of memory, identity and the power of narratives. Lin ‘The Silent One’ Vu is a gangster in Chinese-occupied Hanoi, living in the steaming, paranoid alleyways of the 36 Streets. Born in Vietnam, raised in Australia, everywhere she is an outsider. Through grit and courage, Lin has carved a place for herself in the Hanoi underworld under the tutelage of Bao Nguyen, who is training her to fight and survive. Because on the streets there are no second chances. Meanwhile the people of Hanoi are succumbing to Fat Victory, an addictive immersive simulation of the US-Vietnam war. When an Englishman – one of the game’s developers – comes to Hanoi on the trail of his friend’s murderer, Lin is drawn into the grand conspiracies of the neon gods: the mega-corporations backed by powerful regimes that seek to control her city. Lin must confront the immutable moral calculus of unjust wars. She must choose: family, country, or gang. Blood, truth, or redemption. No choice is easy on the 36 Streets.
