Life doesn't stop being complicated just because you're dead. In the old days, vampires were sexy, ruthless, and evil. They could, and would, compel the living to do whatever they wanted. They owned the night. Unfortunately, being undead in modern times has unexpected and disturbing challenges. Now nine authors take an amused, and sometimes grim look at the problems some vampires face in the twenty-first century. In "Thin White Duke in Sneakers," a newly turned environmental activist and confirmed vegan has some serious issues with his politically incorrect vampire diet. Family life is disrupted in "Uncle Dmitri" when the police suddenly want to know what kindly Uncle Dmitri might be doing at night besides driving a cab. A young artist in "Take My Breath Away" desperately seeks a real vampire to turn her into an immortal only to discover she will still need to get a job to pay her rent. In "The Face on the Coin," unlife is complicated by obsession, a vampire ghost, and time travel. "Farmer" is a tale of the far-future where humans may well be hunted off the face of the Earth. "Sunrise Decision" is the compelling story of a young marine in Fallujah who can only stop a murderous predator by making his own, personal life and death decision. In "They Shall Take Up Serpents," a predatory Revivalist preacher is brought to justice by a vampire and a cage full of snakes. In "Sale Season," intrigue and vampire romance haunt the art galleries of Europe while "Cursed Blood" asks the eternal question: Do you always have to bite the one you love? These authors were inspired to write by various TV shows, from Star Trek, Forever Knight, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (& Angel) to White Collar, Burn Notice, Vampire Diaries, Being Human, etc. and have made the leap from fanfiction to professional writing. All these stories are original universes.
As we live our lives, we repeatedly make decisions that shape our future circumstances and affect the sort of person we will be. When choosing whether to start a family, or deciding on a career, we often think we can assess the options by imagining what different experiences would be like for us. L. A. Paul argues that, for choices involving dramatically new experiences, we are confronted by the brute fact that we can know very little about our subjective futures. This has serious implications for our decisions. If we make life choices in the way we naturally and intuitively want to--by considering what we care about, and what our future selves will be like if we choose to have the experience--we only learn what we really need to know after we have already committed ourselves. If we try to escape the dilemma by avoiding an experience, we have still made a choice. Choosing rationally, then, may require us to regard big life decisions as choices to make discoveries, small and large, about the intrinsic nature of experience, and to recognize that part of the value of living authentically is to experience one's life and preferences in whatever way they may evolve in the wake of the choices one makes. Using classic philosophical examples about the nature of consciousness, and drawing on recent work in normative decision theory, cognitive science, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, Paul develops a rigorous account of transformative experience that sheds light on how we should understand real-world experience and our capacity to rationally map our subjective futures.
A vampire piggybacking on a king's back while spinning stories and riddles! Poor King Vikram! Tasked by the sorcerer Shaitanish to bring him a corpse, he finds that a vampire named Betal has taken residence in it. He’ll come along only if King Vikram lends a willing ear to a series of riddling tales. There’s the one about the world’s most sensitive ladies: Queens Touchmenot, Itsratherhot and Oohmyhead. There’s the tale of the four foolish brothers Nin, Com, Poo and Oops. Each tale is crazier, funnier, madder than the last, and even if King Vikram doesn’t enjoy the journey - you sure will! The story of Vikram and Betal is over a thousand years old. See this much-loved traditional tale come alive with Priya Kuriyan’s fabulous illustrations. Published by Zubaan.
This book explores the idea that while we see the vampire as a hero of romance, or as a member of an oppressed minority struggling to fit in and acquire legal recognition, the vampire has in many ways changed beyond recognition over recent decades due to radically shifting formations of the sacred in contemporary culture. The figure of the vampire has captured the popular imagination to an unprecedented extent since the turn of the millennium. The philosopher René Girard associates the sacred with a communal violence that sacred ritual controls and contains. As traditional formations of the sacred fragment, the vampire comes to embody and enact this ‘sacred violence’ through complex blood bonds that relate the vampire to the human in wholly new ways in the new millennium.
In the modern world vampires come in all forms: they can be perpetrators or victims, metaphors or monsters, scapegoats for sinfulness or mirrors of our own evil. What becomes obvious from the scope of the fifteen essays in this collection is that vampires have infiltrated just about every area of popular culture and consciousness. In fact, the way that vampires are depicted in all types of media is often a telling signifier of the fears and expectations of a culture or community and the way that it perceives itself; and others. The volume’s essays offer a fascinating insight into both vampires themselves and the cultures that envisage them.
What will happen if three Vampire sisters started living in your ordinary neighborhood? Ella, the beautiful and conservative eldest sister Angelica, the air-headed and girly middle child Rinden, the quiet and cool youngest daughter They have to stay in Koharu apartment to learn more about human society. From experiencing the human romance, the thrill of chasing dreams, to endless struggle in tight-budget condition--their fun everyday life is now available in Full-color!