Deus Ex Girlfriend


Book Description

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.




Deus Ex Machina


Book Description

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.




The Complete Idiot's Guide to Getting Your Romance Published


Book Description

Takes the budding romance novelist through the entire process of developing story ideas, editing, finding publishers, and marketing.




Stray Cat Strut 2


Book Description

A young warrior discovers her true potential as a cybernetic samurai battling conspiracies and aliens in this original, action-packed cyberpunk series. There's always a need for heroes in the city of New Montreal. So when a young girl is kidnapped by business-backed mercenaries, Catherine "Cat" LeBlanc—who's been a cyber-samurai for little more than a day—teams up with pyrotechnic nun-samurai Gomorrah to determine why a corporation would target a child . . . and what exactly they did to her. Having only recently ascended from your average nobody to what many would consider the pinnacle of humanity, the inexperienced Cat is overwhelmed, to say the least. She's worried about how her girlfriend, Lucy, will react to the changes, and wonders whether she can use her newfound power and growing influence to care for her "kittens," a group of orphans in her charge. Meanwhile, as if black-ops assassins and their corporate masters weren't dangerous enough, the alien Antithesis have infiltrated the mining town of Black Bear. Capable of mimicking inanimate objects, the aliens could be anywhere—and anything. Rooting out and combatting these shapeshifting aliens would be a chore for even the most seasoned samurai. For Cat, it will test the very limits of both her fighting skills and her ability to save lives. The second volume of the hit LitRPG sci-fi series—with more than four million views on Royal Road—now available on Audible and wherever ebooks are sold!




How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend, Vol. 1


Book Description

En route to school one spring day, Tomoya Aki meets the girl of his dreams amid the dancing cherry blossom petals. But his bliss is soon crushed with the realization that the girl on the other end of his fateful encounter is none other than his boring, bland wallflower of a classmate! Now Tomoya, an aspiring video game developer, is on a mission: turn this dull damsel into the heroine of a dating sim...or bust!




Canadian Cinema Since the 1980s


Book Description

Award-winning author David L. Pike offers a unique focus on the crucial quarter-century in Canadian filmmaking when the industry became a viable force on the international stage. Pike provides a lively, personal, and accessible history of the most influential filmmakers and movements of both Anglo-Canadian and Quebecois cinema, from popular movies to art film and everything in between. Along with in-depth studies of key directors, including David Cronenberg, Patricia Rozema and Denys Arcand, Jean-Claude Lauzon, Robert Lepage, Léa Pool, Atom Egoyan, and Guy Maddin, Canadian Cinema since the 1980s reflects on major themes and genres and explores the regional and cultural diversity of the period. Pike positions Canadian filmmaking at the frontlines of a profound cinematic transformation in the age of global media and presents fresh perspectives on both its local and international contexts. Making a significant advance in the study of the film industry of the period, Canadian Cinema since the 1980s is also an ideal text for students, researchers, and Canadian film enthusiasts.




Saul Bellow


Book Description

A three-time National Book Award for Fiction winner, Saul Bellow (1915-2005) is one of the most highly regarded American authors to emerge since World War II. His 60-year career produced 14 novels and novellas, two volumes of nonfiction, short story collections, plays and a book of collected letters. His 1953 breakthrough novel The Adventures of Augie March was followed by Seize the Day (1956), Herzog (1964) and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970). His Humboldt's Gift won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 and contributed to his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature that year. This literary companion provides more than 200 entries about his works, literary characters, events and persons in his life. Also included are an introduction and overview of Bellow's life, statements made by him during interviews, suggestions for writing and further study and an extensive bibliography.




Labor of Love


Book Description

A brilliant and surprising investigation into why we date the way we do




The Films of Fritz Lang


Book Description

ln this volume Tom Gunning examines the films of Fritz Lang not only as a stylistically coherent body of work, but as an attempt to portray the modern world through cinema. The world of modernity in which systems replace individuals is conveyed by Lang's mastery of cinematic set design, composition and editing. Lang presents not only a decades-long vision of cinematic narrative which can be compared to that of Alfred Hitchcock or Jean Renoir, but a view of modernity that relates strongly to the ideas of Adorno, Brecht, Benjamin and Kracauer. From the sweeping allegorical films of the 20s to the chilly and abstract thrillers of the 50s, Lang's films, Gunning claims, are 'among the most precious records of the twentieth century'. The Films of Fritz Lang immeasurably enriches our understanding of a great artist and, in so doing, reimagines what a film arlist is: an author who fades away even in being recognised and interpreted, an enigmatic figure at the junction of aesthetics, history, biography and theory.




French Gay Modernism


Book Description

The first four decades of the twentieth century saw male homosexuality appear in French literature with increasing frequency and boldness. Departing from earlier, more muted presentations, André Gide, Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau, René Crevel, Francis Carco, and a host of less-famous writers, all created overtly gay characters are gave them increasingly numerous and significant roles. Far from being simply shunned or marginalized, a number of these works were instead accepted as canonical. Lawrence Schehr's French Gay Modernism is the only study devoted to the analyzing these representations of male homosexuality in early twentieth-century French literature. Schehr explains how earlier representations of homosexuality, encoded rather than conspicuous, served as a basis for later writers to treat homosexual behavior as sets of relationships rather than as secrets or scandals. The prominence of authors such as Proust and Gide also helped other writers take up homosexual relationships in their work, often by adopting the same representational strategies. Schehr doesn't limit his study to high literary culture, however. He devotes considerable attention to popular writers whose homosexual characters encounter contempt, scorn, and worse and whose portrayals of homosexual couples and society were at once more open and more at risk.