Daemons Are Forever

A richly illustrated tapestry of interwoven studies spanning some six thousand years of history, Dæmons Are Forever is at once a record of archaic contacts and transactions between humans and protean spirit beings—dæmons—and an account of exchanges, among human populations, of the science of spirit beings: dæmonology. Since the time of the Indo-European migrations, and especially following the opening of the Silk Road, a common dæmonological vernacular has been shared among populations ranging from East and South Asia to Northern Europe. In this virtuoso work of historical sleuthing, David Gordon White recovers the trajectories of both the “inner demons” cohabiting the bodies of their human hosts and the “outer dæmons” that those same humans recognized each time they encountered them in their enchanted haunts: sylvan pools, sites of geothermal eruptions, and dark forest groves. Along the way, he invites his readers to reconsider the potential and promise of the historical method in religious studies, suggesting that a “connected histories” approach to Eurasian dæmonology may serve as a model for restoring history to its proper place at the heart of the discipline of the history of religions.

New York Times bestselling author Simon R. Green continues his Secret Histories fantasy adventure series featuring supernatural super agent Eddie Drood. The name’s Drood. Shaman Drood. For centuries, my seriously dysfunctional family have been battling the forces of evil, all the while keeping you everyday folks safe, sound, and blissfully unaware of just how truly nasty this world can be. And due to some recent internal conflicts, I’m the man in charge of the whole mess. So, of course, things are about to go sideways. It turns out that in the darkest days of World War II, my family was in a hard place, fighting a desperate battle against some infernal creatures the Nazis had brought into the fray. So, the Droods decided to fight fiend with fiend, making a very stupid deal with a bunch of demons called the Loathly Ones to take our side. The good news is they did a hell of a job. The bad news is they decided to stick around. Now, they’re calling home to let their even more nightmarish masters know that this world is ripe for conquest. And me and mine are the only ones who can stop them.

Join supernatural agent Eddie Drood on a dangerous adventure in the second Secret Histories novel from New York Times bestselling author Simon R. Green. “Fans of fast-paced heroics, featuring a snarky knight armored in silver and sarcasm, need look no further; Eddie Drood is your guy.”—SF Revu For centuries, the Droods have been fighting the monsters in the shadows so that the rest of you lot can go about your everyday lives. These days, I’m the head of the family, and it’s fallen to me to deal with a bit of a mess left over from World War II. Seems that back then the Droods made a pact with a bunch of demons known as the Loathly Ones to fight some really nasty buggers called up by the Nazis. Once the war was over, we couldn’t get rid of them. Now they’re calling their masters to invade and destroy our world...and we Droods are the last, best hope of stopping them. I’d say that the world is in a major lot of trouble.

New York Times bestselling author Simon Green introduces a new kind of hero, one who fights the good fight against some very old foes in the first novel in the Secret Histories series. The name’s Bond. Shaman Bond. Actually, that's just his cover. His real name is Eddie Drood, but when your job includes a license to kick supernatural arse on a regular basis, you find your laughs where you can. For centuries, his family has been the secret guardian of Humanity, all that stands between all of you and all of the really nasty things that go bump in the night. As a Drood field agent he wore the golden torc, he killed monsters, and he protected the world. He loved his job. Right up to the point where his own family declared him rogue for no reason. Now, the only people who can help Eddie prove his innocence are the people he used to consider his enemies...

Deciphering the script for the Big Bang has now become a joint effort of particle physicists and cosmologists. The origin and first moments of the early Universe were determined by the same fundamental processes which are studied in terrestrial accelerators and whose traces from the early Universe can be seen in astrophysical observations. It is now almost universally accepted that most of the debris left over from the Big Bang is likely to be in the form of particle dark matter. Identifying its nature and measuring its abundance in the Universe have become major goals of theorists and experimentalists alike. This volume reviews the progress made at the frontiers of research in these rapidly expanding fields. A broad range of topics, from inflation to primordial black holes to physics at the Planck era, and to dark matter and neutrinos — both reviews and reports on the most recent advances — is presented by leaders in the field. Contents: Neutrino Puzzles and Their Implications for the Nature of New Physics (R N Mohapatra)Neutrino Oscillation Search in CHORUS and NOMAD (J Herin)Double Beta Decay — Physics Beyond the Standard Model Now, and in Future (GENIUS) (H V Klapdor-Kleingrothaus)Cryogenic Searches for Dark Matter (D A Bauer)Accelerator Constraints on Neutralino Dark Matter (J Ellis)Non-universal Soft SUSY Breaking and Dark Matter (P Nath & R Arnowitt)Status of the Heidelberg Dark Matter Search (HDMS) Experiment (Y Ramachers)WIMPs Detection Using Double Phase TEA Doped Xenon (H Wang)Probing Inflation with Large-Scale Structure (J Frieman)Who is the Inflaton? (E Kolb)Recent Progress in Inflationary Cosmology (A Linde)Preheating After Inflation (L Kofman)What is the Future of Causal Models of Cosmic Structure Formation? (A Albrecht)Magnetic Fields from the Electroweak Phase Transition (O Törnkvist)Finite Temperature Corrections to CP Violating Asymmetries for Baryogenesis (L Covi et al.)Evaporation of Cosmological Black Holes (R Bousso & S W Hawking)Black Holes and Superstrings (R E Kallosh)The Importance of Non-Gaussian Fluctuations in Inflationary Primordial Black Hole Production (J S Bullock & J R Primack)and other papers Readership: Astrophysicists and high energy physicists. Keywords:Big Bang;Early;Universe;Neutrino;Dark Matter;Cosmology;Primordial;Astrophysics

The #1 New York Times Bestseller! Return to the world of His Dark Materials—now an HBO original series starring Dafne Keen, Ruth Wilson, Andrew Scott, and Lin-Manuel Miranda—in the second volume of Philip Pullman’s new bestselling masterwork The Book of Dust. The windows between the many worlds have been sealed and the momentous adventures of Lyra Silvertongue’s youth are long behind her—or so she thought. Lyra is now a twenty-year-old undergraduate at St. Sophia’s College and intrigue is swirling around her once more. Her daemon Pantalaimon is witness to a brutal murder, and the dying man entrusts them with secrets that carry echoes from their past. The more Lyra is drawn into these mysteries, the less she is sure of. Even the events of her own past come into question when she learns of Malcolm Polstead’s role in bringing her to Jordan College. Now Lyra and Malcolm will travel far beyond the confines of Oxford, across Europe and into the Levant, searching for a city haunted by daemons, and a desert said to hold the truth of Dust. The dangers they face will challenge everything they thought they knew about the world, and about themselves. Praise for The Book of Dust “It’s a stunning achievement, this universe Pullman has created and continues to build on.” —The New York Times “Pullman’s writing is simple, unpretentious, beautiful, true. The conclusion to The Book of Dust can’t come soon enough.”—The Washington Post

A thrilling new fantasy series full of magic and betrayal—from Evelyn Skye, New York Times bestselling author of the Crown’s Game series. Sora can move as silently as a ghost and hurl throwing stars with lethal accuracy. Her gemina, Daemon, can win any physical fight blindfolded and with an arm tied around his back. They are apprentice warriors of the Society of Taigas—marked by the gods to be trained in magic and the fighting arts to protect the kingdom of Kichona. As their graduation approaches, Sora and Daemon look forward to proving themselves worthy of belonging in the elite group—but in a kingdom free of violence since the Blood Rift Rebellion many years ago, it’s been difficult to make their mark. So when Sora and Daemon encounter a strange camp of mysterious soldiers while on a standard scouting mission, they decide the only thing to do to help their kingdom is to infiltrate the group. Taking this risk will change Sora’s life forever—and lead her on a mission of deception that may fool everyone she’s ever loved. Love, spies, and adventure abound as Sora and Daemon unravel a complex web of magic and secrets that might tear them—and the entire kingdom—apart forever.