Dead Stars

“Dead Stars is the London Fields of Los Angeles, the Ulysses of TMZ culture—an immensely literate, fearsomely interior novel about people who are neither.”—Tom Bissell, GQ At age thirteen, Telma is famous as the world’s youngest breast cancer survivor until threatened with obscurity by a four-year-old who’s just undergone a mastectomy…. Reeyonna believes that auditioning for pregnant teenage porn will help fulfill her dream of befriending Kanye West…. Jackie, a photographer once celebrated for arty nudes of her young daughter, is working at a Sears Family Portrait boutique…. And Oscar-winning Michael Douglas searches for meaning while his wife, Catherine, guest-stars on Glee. Moving forward with the inexorable force of a tsunami, Dead Stars is Bruce Wagner’s most lavish and remarkable translation yet of the national zeitgeist: post-privacy porn culture, a Kardashianworld of rapid-cycling, disposable narrative where reality-show triumph is the new American narcotic.

Dead Stars is a science fiction horror role-playing game powered by the alternate d20 Universal Decay rules system. Pick a race - from the ever-familiar humans to the amorphous gorbrasch or sleazy helizara - strap on some personal armor and pick up a sliver rifle or get a cerebral computer implant and grab your toolkit. Or both. Then get together with your friends to face a universe of dangers, wonders, opportunities, and quite possibly a messy death. This book contains everything you will need to play or run a game in Dead Stars as well as rules for using the Universal Decay system in alternate genres, incorporating everything from swords and sorcery to vehicle energy weapons, personal armor, nanotechnology and starships.

"North, is where the battle will take place. North, is where Farden must go. But to death, to glory, or to both?..." - DEAD STARS PART TWO is the second in the two-part finale to Ben Galley's debut fantasy series - THE EMANESKA SERIES. Blisteringly action-packed, stunningly epic, it pushes every boundary of the Series so far.

"Swimming with Dead Stars by Vi Khi Nao is a novel that follows adjunct literature instructor Maldon on a cross-country journey to undergo a medical procedure to repair a heart condition. The novel is a hallucinatory meditation on the stars and planets, the precariousness of human existence, the cruel inequities of labor and healthcare, chickens and ice cream, and the grace that comes from enduring the physical and psychic pain wrought by pernicious social forces that enslave us all"--

"The sky is falling. The world trembles beneath it. Emaneska is crying out for a saviour..." - DEAD STARS PART ONE is the beginning of the end, the first in a two-part epic finale to Ben Galley's debut fantasy series - THE EMANESKA SERIES. Join Farden the mage for one last incredible fight. Emaneska needs him now more than ever.

“A wonderful book” from the National Book Award for Poetry finalist that explores themes of dislocation and danger (Bob Hicok, author of Red Rover, Red Rover). The speaker in this extraordinary collection finds herself dislocated: from her childhood in California, from her family’s roots in Mexico, from a dying parent, from her prior self. The world is always in motion—both toward and away from us—and it is also full of risk: from sharks unexpectedly lurking beneath estuarial rivers to the dangers of New York City, where, as Ada Limón reminds us, even rats find themselves trapped by the garbage cans they’ve crawled into. In such a world, how should one proceed? Throughout Sharks in the Rivers, Limón suggests that we must cleave to the world as it “keep[s] opening before us,” for, if we pay attention, we can be one with its complex, ephemeral, and beautiful strangeness. Loss is perpetual, and each person’s mouth “is the same / mouth as everyone’s, all trying to say the same thing.” For Limón, it’s the saying—individual and collective—that transforms each of us into “a wound overcome by wonder,” that allows “the wind itself” to be our “own wild whisper.” “Through the steamy, thorny undergrowth, up through the cold concrete, under the swift river, Limon soars and twirls like a bird, high on heart.” —Jennifer L. Knox, author of Crushing It

"Exquisite . . . A powerful example of how to carry the things that define us without being broken by them." --WASHINGTON POST

The last hero passed away long ago and a period of peace has been in heavy supply. That means nothing to the mighty Queen Jappina, who wants to take the Earth as her own once again. Carlos Zane Manuel doesn't know it but he is going to be the one to stop her, wielding the ancient source of power known as Energy.