The Nether Regions

This rambunctious first novel by the author of the bestselling Corelli's Mandolin is set in an impoverished, violent, yet ravishingly beautiful country somewhere in South America. When the haughty Dona Constanza decides to divert a river to fill her swimming pool, the consequences are at once tragic, heroic, and outrageously funny. "Walks a precarious edge between slapstick and pathos, never once losing its balance."--Washington Post Book World.

Novel about the coping mechanisms of a woman longing for death but stuck with life. A stroke has robbed Beverly of speech, movement and the loss of one eye. She uses her enforced time in the hydrotherapy pool to imagine parallel realities, drawing her inspiration from the other women in the pool. She hopes to create a reality she can escape into entirely, but is unable to keep her own memories from intruding into the narrative. Explores themes of truth and fiction. Author's previous titles include the novels for teenagers 'A Long Way To Tipperary' and 'Wyrd'. This is her first adult novel.

Gear up for laughter in the hereafter as Socrates sets out to assassinate every soul who can remember the mortal world “Filled with wordplay to die for, Randal Graham’s latest dizzying, irresistible life-after-death satire tackles perennial existential questions with humor and hunger.” — Foreword Reviews on Afterlife Crisis What do you get when a narcissistic megalomaniac plagued by daddy issues leads a horde of angry zealots, xenophobes, and ornery incels on a crusade to Make the Afterlife Great Again? You get an out-of-this-world adventure in which history’s greatest minds face an apocalypse that could make Armageddon look like a cotillion. You also get Nether Regions, the third installment of Randal Graham’s Beforelife Series. Picking up the threads of Beforelife and Afterlife Crisis, Nether Regions reveals what happens when two of the afterlife’s best-known residents have a baby: the first one born in the hereafter. That baby holds a secret — one that sets off an adventure featuring Socrates, Albert Einstein, Nostradamus, Elizabeth I, Sigmund Freud, Neferneferuaten, and at least 200 Napoleons, all doing their level best to keep the afterlife from turning into hell.

Delora November is a survivor--ask anyone in Redstar, Alabama, and they will tell you that. Her ex-husband put her in a burn ward and she came fighting back. She works three jobs and on the surface she's keeping it together. Redstar itself works its own magic. When the thought of yet another hospital is too much, Delora turns to healer women she's heard might help. In the quiet, breathing depths of Bayou Lisse she meets Sophie Cofe. It seems like magic indeed when Delora finds answers to questions she had yet to ask and cures for ills she had thought beyond fixing. But underneath her happiness there is still a lurking evil that can take away everything Delora--and Sophie--hold dear.

The action-packed Minecraft follow-up to Invasion of the Overworld! Gameknight999, a real-life Minecraft user trapped inside the game he loves to play, and his friend Crafter have transported to a new server. Malacoda is the King of the Nether, a terrible ghast that wants to destroy all of Minecraft with his massive army of blazes, magma cubes, zombie pigmen, and wither skeletons. Knowing the lives of all those within Minecraft—as well as those in the physical world—are depending on them, Gameknight and Crafter will need to search the land to recruit an NPC army. But the battles Gameknight’s already fought have left him doubting his abilities, and he’ll need to dig deep to find his courage if he’s to have any shot at victory. Epic battles, terrible monsters, heartwarming friendships, and spine-tingling suspense . . . Battle for the Nether takes the adventures of Gameknight999 to the next level in a nonstop roller-coaster ride of adventure. Sky Pony Press, with our Good Books, Racehorse and Arcade imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of books for young readers—picture books for small children, chapter books, books for middle grade readers, and novels for young adults. Our list includes bestsellers for children who love to play Minecraft; stories told with LEGO bricks; books that teach lessons about tolerance, patience, and the environment, and much more. In particular, this adventure series is created especially for readers who love the fight of good vs. evil, magical academies like Hogwarts in the Harry Potter saga, and games like Minecraft, Terraria, and Pokemon GO. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Three adolescent boys with a single goal: see a real live naked girl. The result? Razor-sharp, rapid-fire, and raunchy, of course. And beyond hilarious. Fifteen-year-old Matt Gratton and his two best friends, Coop and Sean, always set themselves a summertime goal. This year's? To see a real-live naked girl for the first time -- quite a challenge, given that none of the guys has the nerve to even ask a girl out on a date. But catching a girl in the buff starts to look easy compared to Matt's other summertime aspiration: to swim the 100-yard butterfly (the hardest stroke known to God or man) as a way to impress Kelly West, the sizzling new star of the swim team. In the spirit of Hollywood’s blockbuster comedies, screenwriter-turned-YA-novelist Don Calame unleashes a true ode to the adolescent male: characters who are side-splittingly funny, sometimes crude, yet always full of heart.

This timely book revisits cryptic female choice in arthropods, gathering detailed contributions from around the world to address key behavioral, ecological and evolutionary questions. The reader will find a critical summary of major breakthroughs in taxon-oriented chapters that offer many new perspectives and cases to explore and in many cases unpublished data. Many groups of arthropods such as spiders, harvestmen, flies, moths, crickets, earwigs, beetles, eusocial insects, shrimp and crabs are discussed. Sexual selection is currently the focus of numerous and controversial theoretical and experimental studies. Selection in mating and post-mating patterns can be shaped by several different mechanisms, including sperm competition, extreme sexual conflict and cryptic female choice. Discrimination among males during or after copulation is called cryptic female choice because it occurs after intromission, the event that was formerly used as the definitive criterion of male reproductive success and is therefore usually difficult to detect and confirm. Because it sequentially follows intra- and intersexual interactions that occur before copulation, cryptic female choice has the power to alter or negate precopulatory sexual selection. However, though female roles in biasing male paternity after copulation have been proposed for a number of species distributed in many animal groups, cryptic female choice continues to be often underestimated. Furthermore, in recent years the concept of sexual conflict has been frequently misused, linking sexual selection by female choice irrevocably and exclusively with sexually antagonistic co-evolution, without exploring other alternatives. The book offers an essential source of information on how two fields, selective cooperation and individual sex interests, work together in the context of cryptic female choice in nature, using arthropods as model organisms. It is bound to spark valuable discussions among scientists working in evolutionary biology across the world, motivating new generations to unveil the astonishing secrets of sexual biology throughout the animal kingdom.