Imagine this: you, living with your homicidal cousin, the "little kid", and your aunt, get chased out into a forest and knocked out just to wake up in a new world, with more than enough surprises. That's what happens to me, Xylina Ulrica, a not-so-average 17-year-old, whisked off to a new world, filled with surprises, creatures beyond my belief, and a secret to my life. You won't believe what I meet here, including a wolf who's smarter than she seems and a prince of an unknown land. I get dumped into a world at war filled with fights between dragons, vampires, and werewolves! I have to fight for my life and others and figure out who I really am. Cause, believe me, so far I'm lost. Come on! Join me and my newfound friends on the adventure of a lifetime, avoiding the darkness that is prepared to consume this world and learning what it truly means to be Darkness, Obliged. Visit my web site at www.darknessseries.com

In U2’s Songs of Trauma and Hope: “Between the Midnight and the Dawning", Ingunn Røysland and Charles Ivan Armstrong show that trauma is an important theme for U2. While this leads the band to confront extreme instances of grief and suffering, this does not prevent them to cross (in the words of their song “A Sort of Homecoming”) “the fields of mourning to a light that's in the distance.” Theories from trauma and memory studies are deployed in the examination of song lyrics and performances by U2, spanning from the early days of the band to more recent times. In their exploration of light and dark, of hope and trauma within the U2 catalogue, Røysland and Armstrong acknowledge the complexity of the songs, addressing different layers, including romantic as well as divine allegory. The authors also address the band’s troublesome lyrics, with an entire chapter devoted to “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” as well as the role of multidirectional memory and significant places, so-called lieux de mémoire, in U2’s dealings with a ranger of historical conflicts and crises. They further examine how music plays an important part in the path of healing from traumatic wounds, analysing the reception of the songs. Ultimately, it is suggested, U2 shows us how to get “through the night.”

Text and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll explores the interaction between two of the most powerful socio-cultural movements in the post-war years - the literary forces of the Beat Generation and the musical energies of rock and its attendant culture. Simon Warner examines the interweaving strands, seeded by the poet/novelists Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and others in the 1940s and 1950s, and cultivated by most of the major rock figures who emerged after 1960 - Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Bowie, the Clash and Kurt Cobain, to name just a few. This fascinating cultural history delves into a wide range of issues: Was rock culture the natural heir to the activities of the Beats? Were the hippies the Beats of the 1960s? What attitude did the Beat writers have towards musical forms and particularly rock music? How did literary works shape the consciousness of leading rock music-makers and their followers? Why did Beat literature retain its cultural potency with later rock musicians who rejected hippie values? How did rock musicians use the material of Beat literature in their own work? How did Beat figures become embroiled in the process of rock creativity? These questions are addressed through a number of approaches - the influence of drugs, the relevance of politics, the effect of religious and spiritual pursuits, the rise of the counter-culture, the issue of sub-cultures and their construction, and so on. The result is a highly readable history of the innumerable links between two of the most revolutionary artistic movements of the last 60 years.

Things haven’t been going particularly well for humanity. A new civilization has risen from the ashes of the late 21st century End of Times, and it has thrived in the few remaining inhabitable highland areas of the planet, thanks mainly to the all-powerful State governance engineering a series of stunning advances in Artificial Intelligence. Something, however, is going horribly wrong on Planet 42. People are disappearing at an alarming rate, and the State is beset by a series of crippling scandals all the while most of its people slave away in something close to abject poverty. So much for the supposed socialist utopia. Andrew Weems is a scrawny young journalism student in The Highlands of Alba, once known as Scotland. He has a quirky, some would say annoying sense of humor and swears quite a lot. His best friend is John McGregor, an elite Alban college student, and his other friend is John’s girlfriend, Claire Renshaw, a talented cybercrimes student. In trying to find information on the death of her older sister, Claire hacks into some highly classified State data relating to something known as the Elyssium program, and the discovery sets in motion a chain of events that will lead them all on an epic journey encompassing kidnap, murder, assassination attempts, fishing, strange mushrooms, and the resultant sea monster, and other things. Ultimately, the shocking truth about the disappearances is exposed and this leads Claire to a confrontation with horrors, and evil beyond imagination. Except that it has been imagined, so … with horrors and evil beyond comprehension, instead.

A collection of Gothic ghost stories and tales of horror by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

What happens when a supernatural being escape from the hell prison into the mortal world? Will our main protagonist be able to capture it again? Will he be able to do it? After 500 years... "Remember, Kairi. You're my brother. Although we're not blood-related, I have every right to protect you." - Rafiz "WE WELCOME OUR MASTER OF STELLAR!" - Pegasus Spirit. "I thought I have killed all the Knight Seeyer but... I left one more..." - Dark Ries. "We have to take him to Syarantonia." - Agi "Searched for that boy. Do not let him live!"" - Dark Revier "I think... I might have fallen in love with him. But, he is not an ordinary man."- Aries

From the Beat poets' incarnation of the "white Negro" through Iron John and the Men's Movement to the paranoid masculinity of Timothy McVeigh, white men in this country have increasingly imagined themselves as victims. In Taking It Like a Man, David Savran explores the social and sexual tensions that have helped to produce this phenomenon. Beginning with the 1940s, when many white, middle-class men moved into a rule-bound, corporate culture, Savran sifts through literary, cinematic, and journalistic examples that construct the white man as victimized, feminized, internally divided, and self-destructive. Savran considers how this widely perceived loss of male power has played itself out on both psychoanalytical and political levels as he draws upon various concepts of masochism--the most counterintuitive of the so-called perversions and the one most insistently associated with femininity. Savran begins with the writings and self-mythologization of Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. Although their independent, law-defying lifestyles seemed distinctively and ruggedly masculine, their literary art and personal relations with other men in fact allowed them to take up social and psychic positions associated with women and racial minorities. Arguing that this dissident masculinity has become increasingly central to U.S. culture, Savran analyzes the success of Sam Shepard as both writer and star, as well as the emergence of a new kind of action hero in movies like Rambo and Twister. He contends that with the limited success of the civil rights and women's movements, white masculinity has been reconfigured to reflect the fantasy that the white male has become the victim of the scant progress made by African Americans and women. Taking It Like a Man provocatively applies psychoanalysis to history. The willingness to inflict pain upon the self, for example, serves as a measure of men's attempts to take control of their situations and their ambiguous relationship to women. Discussing S/M and sexual liberation in their historical contexts enables Savran to consider not only the psychological function of masochism but also the broader issues of political and social power as experienced by both men and women.