Deus Ex Girlfriend

Meet Abiel, a twenty-something suffering from depression of the post-breakup variety. Meet Aly, a twenty-something ray of sunshine. Meet Lenny, Abiel's best friend and brother figure. Meet them all and their little worlds that come apart and fall back together. Most of all, meet the owl, a being that stalks all their lives, an idea that exists on the fringes of all of their minds.

Traveling to a ghost town, a software engineer becomes trapped in a mystery -- but she plans a mind-bending escape... Deus ex Machina; Logos is a haunted book. Legends of gold still echo across the Rocky Mountains. When a software engineer for a printing company, takes a vacation and writes about a journey to find a hidden book, will she find gold? Follow the traces to an abandoned train depot in a ghost town. Discover computer innovations of America resonating in a spectral link between the golden legends of New Spain and the metamorphic myths of Pompeii. From the phantasms of software encryption to the geometrical precision of Anasazi ruins, this book keeps you searching far beyond the idea of a fiction. As complex and intriguing as an Umberto Eco novel, Charles Sauer's metafiction is a literary work that operates on several levels. In one aspect an entertaining horror story about the ghost of a woman trapped inside a book, it is also a philosophical inquiry about myths, archetypes, and fiction. It challenges contemporaneous ideas, asking the question: Does a tangible object -- like this novel -- mirror reality in such a way to suggest that essence precedes existence? Or is the question itself a trap? The author seamlessly weaves timeless myths like the tragic love story between Narcissus and Echo with contemporaneous themes like the manipulation of information and identity theft. Further, Sauer unprecedentedly and poetically embeds software source code within the story! Solve the mystery: Read the fascinating Deus ex Machina.

A group of Greek gods and goddesses moves in next door to Stewart in order to help him reunite with his long lost girlfriend.

In the third hilarious installment of The Reluctant Reaper series, Kirsty d’Arc’s first Reaper mission gets personal when her evil ex-boss escapes from Hell and physically possesses Shannon, Kirsty’s BFF. To reunite rightful body and soul, Kirsty must outwit a demented demon, fend off an insane strangler, and bend the very rules of Hell and Earth. Kirsty may be a full-fledged Reaper with a scythe of her own, but Dante is still miffed that she broke the Reaper rules to take down her evil ex-boss, Conrad. And Dante is not above saying “I told you so” when Conrad develops strange demonic powers and escapes to the Mortal Coil. Although barely speaking, Kirsty and Dante are sent on Kirsty’s first Reaper mission: bring Conrad back alive…er…dead…er…Just bring him back to Hell. But before they can re-scythe him, Conrad evicts his own daughter’s soul to take over her body. Yes, he’s not a good person. So it’s up to two good people (who are, ironically, from Hell) to fix this. But can Kirsty and Dante put their differences aside in time to take down Conrad and save his daughter?

In 2008, Waltz with Bashir shocked the world by presenting a bracing story of war in what seemed like the most unlikely of formats—an animated film. Yet as Donna Kornhaber shows in this pioneering new book, the relationship between animation and war is actually as old as film itself. The world’s very first animated movie was made to solicit donations for the Second Boer War, and even Walt Disney sent his earliest creations off to fight on gruesome animated battlefields drawn from his First World War experience. As Kornhaber strikingly demonstrates, the tradition of wartime animation, long ignored by scholars and film buffs alike, is one of the world’s richest archives of wartime memory and witness. Generation after generation, artists have turned to this most fantastical of mediums to capture real-life horrors they can express in no other way. From Chinese animators depicting the Japanese invasion of Shanghai to Bosnian animators portraying the siege of Sarajevo, from African animators documenting ethnic cleansing to South American animators reflecting on torture and civil war, from Vietnam-era protest films to the films of the French Resistance, from firsthand memories of Hiroshima to the haunting work of Holocaust survivors, the animated medium has for more than a century served as a visual repository for some of the darkest chapters in human history. It is a tradition that continues even to this day, in animated shorts made by Russian dissidents decrying the fighting in Ukraine, American soldiers returning from Iraq, or Middle Eastern artists commenting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Arab Spring, or the ongoing crisis in Yemen. Nightmares in the Dream Sanctuary: War and the Animated Film vividly tells the story of these works and many others, covering the full history of animated film and spanning the entire globe. A rich, serious, and deeply felt work of groundbreaking media history, it is also an emotional testament to the power of art to capture the endurance of the human spirit in the face of atrocity.

IS THIS COINCIDENCE… Derek Guerrero wants to write romance, a far cry from his action-packed, dramatic crime series. To accomplish his goal, he collaborates with young and spunky best-selling author Kim Velasquez. Despite their differences, Derek and Kim find a common bond: a love for anime and a yearning to understand what romance truly is. …OR IS THIS FATE? When a series of anime-themed murders strikes in the metropolis, Derek’s resolve is put to the test, for every clue is leading to a painful secret from his past. Complicating matters is a jealous lover who would stop at nothing to possess Kim, even at the cost of her career. To stop the murders and protect Kim’s slowly-breaking heart, Derek will have to confront his past and unmask his unknown enemies, all while learning to acknowledge his growing feelings for Kim…who just might have something to do with his secret.

10 stories about odd encounters and personal exploration: A young man in search of meaning connects with his dead girlfriend's son. A group of men in Wisconsin start a poetry group while waiting for their favorite bar to be rebuilt. A woman discovers her husband has been hiding a secret. He also wants to rob a bank. A basketball player continually relives the last six seconds of his worst game. An amateur chess player encounters greatness. A girl attempts to leave a small town. But before she goes, she learns the story of one who stayed.

Four Contemporary Novelists offer accounts of the fiction of Angus Wilson, Brian Moore, John Fowles, and V. S. Naipaul. The author has charted the development of each writer; identified dominant themes, controlling techniques, and informing sensibility; explained what each has tried to accomplish and compare theory to practice; provided an appropriate context for appreciation and evaluation of all parts of each canon; and made qualitative discriminations.