First two books together...Four PsychosI'm not so different from most people.Like everyone else, I have life goals.Goal #1: Become a real girl instead of this invisible ghost thing I currently am.Goal #2: Convince the four men I've been haunting for the past five years to pick me to be their new toy after goal one is complete.Goal #3: Figure out who/what I am and why I can't remember anything past the five years I've been haunting this quad.Goal #4: Eat popcorn.See? Perfectly normal. Sort of.Gotta start small, after all.It's not like anyone else is perfect either.****Three TrialsSo, I've checked off some life goals and added a few new ones to my list.Goal #5: Get out of hell's belly without letting my ungrateful charges die.Goal #6: Get a new name that's more badass.Goal #7: Stop wasting my breath on lectures and start annoying the quad hell squad every time they annoy me. Fight fire with fire. Ha! Another hell pun.Goal 8: Find out who the hell killed me.I'll add more. I don't want to overwhelm myself before I even finish checking off my old goals. But seriously, I really do need a more badass name, considering how much I have to keep saving my damsels in distress.I probably shouldn't call them damsels, since they're a little murderous and all.Maybe I should add seeing a hell-certified psychologist to my list of goals.**Sexual situations/content**Reverse Harem**Dark humor galore**Language warning
In this dark and gripping sci-fi noir, an exiled police detective arrives at a lunar penal colony just as a psychotic android begins a murderous odyssey across the far side of the moon. Purgatory is the lawless moon colony of eccentric billionaire, Fletcher Brass: a mecca for war criminals, murderers, sex fiends, and adventurous tourists. You can’t find better drugs, cheaper plastic surgery, or a more ominous travel advisory anywhere in the universe. But trouble is brewing in Brass’s black-market heaven. When an exiled cop arrives in this wild new frontier, he immediately finds himself investigating a string of ruthless assassinations in which Brass himself—and his equally ambitious daughter—are the chief suspects. Meanwhile, two-thousand kilometers away, an amnesiac android, Leonardo Black, rampages across the lunar surface. Programmed with only the notorious “Brass Code”—a compendium of corporate laws that would make Ayn Rand blush—Black has only one goal in mind: to find Purgatory and conquer it. Visual, visceral, and tons of fun, The Dark Side fuses hard science with brutal crime and lunar adventure. It’s an intense, stylish, and action-packed thriller with a body count to match.
Audible Best Seller of 2017 Inc. 11 Great Business Books New York Magazine Best Psychology Books LinkedIn's 12 Books on Leadership to Read Two mavericks in the field of positive psychology deliver a timely message Happiness experts have long told us to tune out our negative emotions and focus instead on mindfulness, positivity, and optimism. Researchers Todd Kashdan, Ph.D., and Robert Biswas-Diener, Dr. Philos., disagree. Positive emotions alone are not enough. Anger makes us creative, selfishness makes us brave, and guilt is a powerful motivator. The real key to success lies in emotional agility. Drawing upon extensive scientific research and a wide array of real-life examples, The Upside of Your Dark Side will be embraced by business leaders, parents, and everyone else who’s ready to put their entire psychological tool kit to work.
Book 3 & 4 together...Two KingdomsI'm getting a little tired of completing my goals, only to have the bar raised too substantially for me to transition at a productive pace...I started off as a sad little ghost with an impossible crush on four really hot, Gothic guys with some attitude problems. Now I'm The Apocalypse, they're the Four Horsemen, and Lucifer is my fucked up daddy. Now my additional goals look like this?Goal #9: Make a deal with the Devil without getting cheated, manipulated, or tricked.Goal #10: Make my boys love me and take over the world...okay...so maybe just that first part. That second part sounds like it could take too much ambition, and I just don't have the drive for that.Goal #11: Make cookies.Goal #12: Call dibs on my favorite color.Goal #13: Find out if my siblings or my father killed me and my boys...**** One ApocalypseThe life goals have stacked up since I started this journey as a sad, lonely little ghost. I'm not sure how things escalated so quickly from trying to be seen and heard, to bearing the weight of the world on my vain little shoulders.As a result, my goals have gotten a little more serious...Goal #14: Learn to take a hit without breaking or suffering some type of death.Goal #15: Decide once and for all if I'm going to save or destroy the world. I'm not sure why people put this sort of responsibility on hell-spawn like me.Goal #16: Practice my evil laugh, because all hell-spawn need a good evil laugh.Goal #17: Find and kill all the unicorns. Mwahahahahaha.Goal #18: Live to enjoy forever with the guys I sacrificed all my memories to save.Goal #19: No matter what, they don't get to die. Or I really will be THE Apocalypse.We're the most screwed up collection of antiheroes the world has ever seen, because the only thing that makes me want to save the world is knowing I could lose my boys forever if I don't. It's one HELL of a love story, you know?**Sexual Content.**Language Warning.**Dark humor.**Reverse Harem.**Series FINALE. (Read in order: Four Psychos, Three Trials, Two Kingdoms, and One Apocalypse. This book cannot be read as a stand-alone.)
An erotic MC romance from International Bestseller Giana Darling about a good girl and the much older outlaw biker Prez who seduces her to the dark side.
Lieutenant Shane Vansen still has nightmares about her parents' deaths at the hands of aliens, but when the past comes back to haunt her in an alien trap, she must remain cool to save the squad.
The Dark Side of Statius' Achilleid explores systematically and for the first time the darker aspects of Statius' Achilleid, bringing to light the poem's tragic and epic dimensions. By seeking to position at centre-stage these darker elements, the book offers several new readings of the Achilleid in relation to its literary inheritance, its gender dynamics, and its generic tensions. This volume delves beneath the surface of a story that ostensibly deals with a light subject matter—the cross-dressing of a young Achilles on Scyros—to offer an in-depth examination of the poem's relationship to its epic and tragic precursors, and to explore its more serious themes. It is shown to challenge traditional epic narratives, examine Achilles' complex familial relationships and his deviant and transgressive heroism, highlight the tragic character of Thetis, and provide glimpses of the horrors that the cataclysmic Trojan War will beget. By looking into Statius' wide-ranging dialogue with his literary predecessors, such as Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Seneca, as well as Statius' previous epic magnum opus, the Thebaid, the multidimensional characterisations of Achilles and other of the poem's key characters, such as Ulysses, Calchas, and Thetis are investigated. Far from simply representing a shameful but essentially humorous cross-dressing episode in Achilles' life that is destined to be forgotten, the Achilleid can be seen to challenge the very fabric of epic by probing the validity and authority of its literary tradition, as well as highlighting its highly innovative and experimental nature.
The Dark Side of Zionism: Israel's Quest for Security through Dominance arises out of the scholarship of the 'new historians, ' a group of mostly Israeli scholars who have uncovered a history widely ignored in the popular media. Baylis Thomas argues that both the early Zionists and, later, the Israelis sought their security through the military domination of the indigenous Arab population of Palestine. This strategy required both avoiding negotiations with the Palestinian-Arabs and provoking the weak Arab states-opposed to the Israeli takeover of Palestine-into entering wars they would lose. The role of British imperial power was crucial in this early history, as was the later U.S. support of Israel, right or wrong. Thomas explores the larger context of this history in chapters on colonization, hegemony, weapons diplomacy, terrorism, nationalism, religion, Zionism, and prospects for resolution of the conflict. While students and scholars of Middle Eastern studies and international relations will find this book valuable, it is intended for the intelligent general reader who is curious about current events yet puzzled about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Israel's national identity, founded on the memory of being victims of the Holocaust, focuses on current events that seem consistent with the past, even as the nation uses force to thwart Palestinian national aspirations. The Dark Side of Zionism argues that peace for both Israelis and Palestinians can only come if Israel relinquishes military rule.
The discredit of a certain brand of capitalism – and the managers that practice it – continues apace. The increasing lack of tolerance for short-term thinking and a systematic neglect of the social, regulatory, and economic conditions in which business ought to operate means we are entering a time of trouble and questions – an era of economic, social, and environmental turbulence. There is a critical need for business educators and trainers to expose students and managers to these issues to examine, explore, and understand the different multifaceted, complex phenomena of our late capitalist era. There is also a need to foster a climate for future and current business managers to reflect, feel, and think differently both ethically and cognitively. The 16 innovative case studies in The Dark Side: Critical Cases on the Downside of Business are designed for this very purpose: to provoke reflection and debate; to challenge and change perceptions; and to create responsible managers. The cases are innovative in two ways. First, in terms of content they acknowledge the diversity of actors and interests in and around organizations. They contain different levels of analysis, and propose different points of view and logics. They recognize that decisions that seem sound when they are made may actually contain the seeds of their later failure. Second, these cases are innovative in terms of format. Whereas most cases are formatted around decision-making situations, these are more diverse and open-ended. This stimulates the use of "judgment" – the capacity to synthesize, integrate, and balance short- and long-term effects, appreciate effects on different groups, and learn to listen and evaluate. Whereas decision-making is the key skill when confronting complicated issues and situations, "judgment-making" relies on experience and is a far better tool in the complex, murky, gray areas typical of business ethics. The cases included here are all finalists or award-winners from the first seven years of the Dark Side of Business Case Competition, a joint event of the Academy of Management's Critical Management Studies Section and Management Education Section. In many areas of management, case studies are almost exclusively devoted to "best practice" cases or difficult decisions faced by basically well-managed firms. When educators look for resources to illustrate to students the more typical cases, let alone the really scandalous practices of the worst firms, the cupboard is almost entirely bare. From the beginning, the Dark Side competition aimed at encouraging case studies that integrate socio-political issues with organizational dynamics, thus contextualizing organizational and management problems within the broader system of capitalism. These cases comprise a diverse and rich collection from a range of countries, continents, and issues and focus on interactions in business organizations as well as between business organizations and groups and societies. The Dark Side: Critical Cases on the Downside of Business is divided into four sections. The first sheds light on gray areas in the behavior of businesses. The second concerns the interactions between business and local communities in diverse countries. The third concerns crises, and specifically how firms may create or manage them. Finally, the fourth section concerns gray areas in business behavior in the global context. The Dark Side: Critical Cases on the Downside of Business will be an essential purchase for educators and is expected to be a widely used resource at all levels of management education.Online Teaching Notes to accompany each chapter are available on request with the purchase of the book.
