Shards

Across the vast expanse of the Great Deep float billions of shattered universes known as the Shards. Populated with vengeful demons and tormented humans, the Shards need Earth just as plants need water to survive. Earth itself is held together by 36 righteous people, 36 hidden saints known as the Lamed Vav. Kill but a few Lamed Vav and the Earth will shatter, and all the Shards that rely upon it will die in a horrible cataclysm. Daniel Fisher is abducted on his wedding day by the demon king, Ashmedai, and he learns he is a Lamed Vavnik, one of these hidden righteous persons upholding the world. The demon Mashit has usurped the throne of demonkind from Ashmedai and has been murdering the Lamed Vav in order to collapse the Earth and bring its great power raining down on all the demon-populated Shards. On a desert-covered Shard teeming with monstrous creatures, pursued by a fearsome demon army, Daniel and Ashmedai, saint and demon, must team up to defeat Mashit before she destroys all of existence with her insane plan. In order to survive, Daniel must ally with evil Ashmedai. Yet who but a saint—a Lamed Vavnik—can save the world? “A surreal and exotic adventure in a unique mythological setting. Scary, exhilarating fun!” - N.K. Jemisin, Hugo award-winning author of The Fifth Season. “A fantastic twist on Jewish mythology...a radical reinvention of Jewish faith and folklore, not to mention the portal fantasy..."One city’s rubble is the next city’s foundation,” Kressel writes. Not only does that simple, profound idea underpin King of Shards’ plot, it’s the method to the book’s majestic, resonant, reality-twisting madness.” — NPR Books “King of Shards is an imaginative, intelligent, and soaring debut that mixes Jewish folklore/mysticism and modern-day social politics. The result is a unique spin on epic fantasy that is both timeless and timely, and a hell of lot of fun. You’ll want to follow Daniel and Rana through the Shards. Trust me.” —Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil’s Rock. “Kressel draws heavily on Hebrew legend and biblical lore to build a robustly imagined fantasy world…Kressel advances his plot briskly through a series of alliances, betrayals, separations, and reunions, and the veiled motives of several of his characters keep his story pleasingly unpredictable. His skill at extrapolating traditional religious lore into the stuff of fantasy bodes well for future books in the series.” — Publishers Weekly “With surprising twists and a deep and detailed universe, King of Shards, the first in a trilogy, is likely to be remembered for more than its Jewish roots.” - Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog

Six teens struggle to discover the source of their strange and horrific abilities in this first book of The Star Shards Chronicles. Dillon has the terrifying power to create massive amounts of destruction with the slightest tweak of his will. Deanna is so consumed by fear, it has become like a black hole, drawing to her the very things that terrify her. Then, when the glare of a supernova sixteen light-years away illuminates the night sky, they have a vision: There are six of them out there, all teenagers, and all suffering from supernatural afflictions that disfigure their bodies and souls. Only by finding one another will the six ever be strong enough to defeat these mysterious forces that, bit by bit, are devouring their souls from the inside out. Acclaimed author Neal Shusterman “combines personal quest, horror, and science fiction into an absorbing exploration of good and evil, guilt, forgiveness and personal responsibility” (VOYA) in this thrilling start to a riveting trilogy. Originally published by Tor Fantasy in 1995.

Willa Hillicrissing, a thirteen-year-old human-alien Hybrid with golden eyes and a wild mane of fox-fur hair, was raised amid the green forests and peaceful seaside setting of Port Dublin in Ireland where, as an apprentice to her Hybrid mentor, Holly Cotton, she takes her first steps on the path to becoming a Cryptic.

A New York Times Notable Book: “Brilliant . . . With verbal glee, Prcic serves up a darkly comic vision of the terrors and misunderstandings of immigration” (Shelf Awareness). Ismet Prcic’s brilliant, provocative, and energetic debut novel is about a young Bosnian, also named Ismet Prcic, who has fled his war-torn homeland and is now struggling to reconcile his past with his present life in California. He is advised that in order to make peace with the corrosive guilt he harbors over leaving his family behind, he must “write everything.” The result is a great rattlebag of memories, confessions, and fictions: sweetly humorous recollections of Ismet’s childhood in Tuzla appear alongside anguished letters to his mother about the challenges of life in this new world. As Ismet’s foothold in the present falls away, his writings are further complicated by stories from the point of view of another young man—real or imagined—named Mustafa, who joined a troop of elite soldiers and stayed in Bosnia to fight. When Mustafa’s story begins to overshadow Ismet’s new-world identity, the reader is charged with piecing together the fragments of a life that has become eerily unrecognizable, even to the one living it. Shards is a thrilling read—a harrowing war story, a stunningly inventive coming of age, and a heartbreaking saga of a splintered family. “Fierce, funny and real, it also says much about war, exile, guilt and fear.” —Chicago Sun-Times, Favorite Books of 2011

With the Spanish conquest of Islamic Granada and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the year 1492 marks the exile from Europe of crucial strands of medieval culture. It also becomes a symbolic marker for the expulsion of a diversity in language and grammar that was disturbing to the Renaissance sensibility of purity and stability. In rewriting Columbus's narrative of his voyage of that year, Renaissance historians rewrote history, as was often their practice, to purge it of an offending vulgarity. The cultural fragments left behind following this exile form the core of Shards of Love, as María Rosa Menocal confronts the difficulty of writing their history. It is in exile that Menocal locates the founding conditions for philology--as a discipline that loves origins--and for the genre of love songs that philology reveres. She crosses the boundaries, both temporal and geographical, of 1492 to recover the "original" medieval culture, with its Mediterranean mix of European, Arabic, and Hebrew poetics. The result is a form of literary history more lyrical than narrative and, Menocal persuasively demonstrates, more appropriate to the Middle Ages than to the revisionary legacy of the Renaissance. In discussions ranging from Eric Clapton's adaption of Nizami's Layla and Majnun, to the uncanny ties between Jim Morrison and Petrarch, Shards of Love deepens our sense of how the Middle Ages is tied to our own age as it expands the history and meaning of what we call Romance philology.

For the first time, enjoy all five books of The Shards of Excalibur series in one omnibus volume! Ariane Forsythe and Wally Knight are just two ordinary Canadian teenagers until the morning they encounter the Lady of the Lake in the unlikely waters of Wascana Lake in Regina, Saskatchewan. Ariane learns she's heir to the power of the Lady, and she and Wally, who turns out to have his own unsuspected connection to the legends of King Arthur, are given the difficult task of finding the five scattered shards of Arthur's sword Excalibur before Merlin can, in his modern-day guise as wealthy and powerful computer magnate Rex Major. If Merlin gets the sword, he will use its power to take over the world and then launch an attack into his homeland of Faerie, no matter what the cost. Ariane's and Wally's quest takes them all over the world (courtesy of the power Ariane has inherited that allows them to travel through water and the clouds), from Saskatchewan to the Northwest Territories to southern France; to New Zealand and the Caribbean; to British Columbia and Scotland, always struggling--and sometimes failing--to stay one step ahead of Rex Major. Along the way, they face betrayal and treachery, difficult choices, and unexpected discoveries. And when the quest is finally achieved and the sword reforged, what happens next is nothing at all like either Wally or Ariane imagined, and threatens everything they've sought to achieve--and everyone they love. Includes Song of the Sword, Twist of the Blade, Lake in the Clouds, Cave Beneath the Sea, and Door Into Faerie.

Kaya is going to war! "An incredible adventure filled with ancient mythological references, lovable characters, and beautifully articulated imagery. A brilliant sequel to the first book..." -A. Mueller "Well, that was quite a rollercoaster..." -CJ Hutchison Kaya Chondra-Li has come home to Raeth! Barely a few weeks ago she was just another suburban teenager looking forward to a long summer vacation. Now she’s in another universe and discovered the truth about her royal lineage and the horrors surrounding the murder of her family. She has also found a brother she never knew existed, but the reunion will have to be short. The maniacal despot who killed her parents and older brother knows Kaya is back on Raeth. Now the last two survivors of the royal family must separate again, and Kaya will once more venture through the untamed wilds of Raeth. Only this time, it’s to draw the enemy away from her brother while she scours the towns and villages for any allies willing to join the fight against the self-proclaimed Imperator and his fanatical army. But on Raeth, monsters do exist. Her only hope is to find those still loyal to the Chondra-Li, and learn the importance of her family name and the awesome powers awakening within her. But can she master control of her new abilities in time to save everyone she loves, as well as the budding rebellion forming around her.

This book highlights the different types of data architecture and illustrates the many possibilities hidden behind the term "Big Data", from the usage of No-SQL databases to the deployment of stream analytics architecture, machine learning, and governance. Scalable Big Data Architecture covers real-world, concrete industry use cases that leverage complex distributed applications , which involve web applications, RESTful API, and high throughput of large amount of data stored in highly scalable No-SQL data stores such as Couchbase and Elasticsearch. This book demonstrates how data processing can be done at scale from the usage of NoSQL datastores to the combination of Big Data distribution. When the data processing is too complex and involves different processing topology like long running jobs, stream processing, multiple data sources correlation, and machine learning, it’s often necessary to delegate the load to Hadoop or Spark and use the No-SQL to serve processed data in real time. This book shows you how to choose a relevant combination of big data technologies available within the Hadoop ecosystem. It focuses on processing long jobs, architecture, stream data patterns, log analysis, and real time analytics. Every pattern is illustrated with practical examples, which use the different open sourceprojects such as Logstash, Spark, Kafka, and so on. Traditional data infrastructures are built for digesting and rendering data synthesis and analytics from large amount of data. This book helps you to understand why you should consider using machine learning algorithms early on in the project, before being overwhelmed by constraints imposed by dealing with the high throughput of Big data. Scalable Big Data Architecture is for developers, data architects, and data scientists looking for a better understanding of how to choose the most relevant pattern for a Big Data project and which tools to integrate into that pattern.