Bleeding Edge

The Good Book. You might have clutched it in your church pew on Sunday mornings. You know the one? With the pebbled black soft cover, the words HOLY BIBLE stamped in gold ink. Perhaps it strengthened your faith, comforted you in dark times. Multiple Bram Stoker Award-nominated John F.D. Taff has assembled a Last Supper of Dark Apostles to turn some of those "good book" parables on their heads--twisting Bible stories into sinister horror tales. Blasphemous? Heretical? We sincerely hope so. As you read on, remember one thing, though. There's no comfort to be found in The Bad Book. No comfort at all. Including stories by Philip Fracassi Kristi DeMeester John Langan ...and many more... Includes story illustrations by Giuseppe Balestra.

A New York Times besteller! It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there’s no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what’s left. Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics—carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people’s bank accounts—without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom—two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhood—till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course. With occasional excursions into the DeepWeb and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we’ve journeyed to since. Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance? Hey. Who wants to know? The Washington Post “Brilliantly written… a joy to read… Bleeding Edge is totally gonzo, totally wonderful. It really is good to have Thomas Pynchon around, doing what he does best.” (Michael Dirda) Slate.com "If not here at the end of history, when? If not Pynchon, who? Reading Bleeding Edge, tearing up at the beauty of its sadness or the punches of its hilarity, you may realize it as the 9/11 novel you never knew you needed… a necessary novel and one that literary history has been waiting for." The New York Times Book Review Exemplary… dazzling and ludicrous... Our reward for surrendering expectations that a novel should gather in clarity, rather than disperse into molecules, isn’t anomie but delight.” (Jonathan Lethem) Wired magazine “The book’s real accomplishment is to claim the last decade as Pynchon territory, a continuation of the same tensions — between freedom and captivity, momentum and entropy, meaning and chaos — through which he has framed the last half-century."

The USA Today–bestselling authors of Home Invasion return with another timely thriller that puts readers on the frontlines of the battle for America. The Shady Hill Mobile Home Park isn't shady or hilly—this is West Texas after all. To military vet John Howard Stark, it's home. And worth fighting for. When a vicious drug cartel starts terrorizing the residents of Shady Hill, the Feds and the local police run for cover. But the good people of Shady Hill make a stand, electing Stark as their chief of police. Once a rancher, always a Texan, Stark and his fellow patriots send the cartel into a bloodthirsty fury by daring to fight back. When the bad guys start slaughtering innocent high school students, the God-fearing folks of Shady Hill find themselves deep in the heart of a bloody battle. It’s a desperate fight for survival that can only end in liberty . . . or death.

Using the tools of competitive strategic analysis, this text identifies and explores the five forces transforming the health care system - horizontal consolidation, vertical integration, industrialization, medical/financial risk assumption, and consumerism. Using these five forces to describe the health care system most likely to emerge in the next decade, it predicts very different fortunes and fates for the medical professions, and hospital, pharmaceutical, medical device, and managed care industries.

"Run or fight, either way, I'm exactly where I need to be—beside you." She's running scared. I'll do anything to keep her. Together we need to slay all her ghosts. Emmie Franklin's the master of a quick escape. She's kept me at arm's length for years, fighting our attraction. When a violent attack leaves her vulnerable, I step up, ready to fight tooth-and-nail to protect my woman. Only Emmie has secrets. And these aren't the type that stay hidden. They're the kind that kill. If you love over the top Aussie alphas, sultry summer nights, and happily ever afters, Rough Edge is the book you're looking for. Trigger warning: This is a darker book than my other series and contains some violence and references to sexual abuse. A happily ever after is still guaranteed, but this is a gritty series so proceeded with caution. Note: This book was previously published under a former pen name. It has been rewritten and updated before release.

The ground beneath the book publishing industry dramatically shifted in 2007, the year the Kindle and the iPhone debuted. Widespread consumer demand for these and other devices has brought the pace of digital change in book publishing from "it might happen sometime" to "it's happening right now"--and it is happening faster than anyone predicted. Yet this is only a transitional phase. Book: A Futurist's Manifesto is your guide to what comes next, when all books are truly digital, connected, and ubiquitous. Through this collection of essays from thought leaders and practitioners, you'll become familiar with a wide range of developments occurring in the wake of this digital book shakeup: Discover new tools that are rapidly transforming how content is created, managed, and distributed Understand the increasingly critical role that metadata plays in making book content discoverable in an era of abundance Look inside some of the publishing projects that are at the bleeding edge of this digital revolution Learn how some digital books can evolve moment to moment, based on reader feedback

It's hammered into us from birth that 'all good things come at a price'. Today, that price looks apocalyptic, with wars, exploitation and environmental collapse in every part of the globe. Some suggest that the carnage is "a price worth paying" for technological progress. No pain, no gain. But technology is precisely the business of minimising the costs and impacts of existence... and by whole orders of magnitude. By now, all human beings should be leading creative, leisure-filled lives in a pristine world of burgeoning diversity. So how did it go so wrong? In a word, inequality. In The Bleeding Edge, Bob Hughes argues that unequal societies are incapable of using new technologies well. Wherever elites exist, self-preservation decrees that they must take control of new technologies to protect and entrench their status, rather than satisfy people's needs. Hughes pursues the latest discoveries about the effects of social inequality on human health, into the field of human environmental impact, and traces today's ecological crisis back to the rise of the world's first elites, 5,000 years ago. He argues that new technologies have never emerged from elites or from the clash of competitive forces, but from largely voluntary, egalitarian collaborations of the kind that produced the world's first working computers. Finally, Hughes shows that an egalitarian world is not 'pie in the sky' but our evolutionary homeland, the glue that holds societies together, and the "cradle of invention" from which all our best ideas emerge. The book concludes: 'Let's assume that the commitment to human equality that's written into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights means exactly what it says, and take it from there.'

‘Fizzes with intellectual curiosity. Kane writes engagingly and with a humility difficult to find among idea-entrepreneurs’ James Harkin, Independent We all think we know what play is. Play is what we do as children, what we do outside of work, what we do for no other reason than for pleasure. But this is only half of the truth. The Play Ethic explores the real meaning of play and shows how a more playful society would revolutionize and liberate our daily lives. Using wide and varied sources – from the Enlightenment to Eminem, Socrates to Chaos theory, Kierkegaard to Karaoke – The Play Ethic shows how play is fundamental to both society and to the individual, and how the work ethic that has dominated the last three centuries is ill-equipped to deal with the modern world. With verve, wit and intelligence, Pat Kane takes us on a tour of the playful world arguing that without it business, the arts, politics, education, even our family and spiritual lives are fundamentally impoverished. The Play Ethic seeks to change the way you look at your daily life, how you interact with others, how you view the world. It is a guidebook to new, exciting – and unsettling – times. Shocking, controversial, yet magnificently argued, The Play Ethic is a book no one who works, or has ever worked, can afford to be without. ‘Kane's Manifesto for a Different Way of Living is a brave attempt to inject a little playfulness . . . into the dull grind of the working stiff’ Iain Finlayson, The Times