In the pitch-perfect tradition of the very best of Nick Hornby, Martin Amis, and Christopher Buckley comes Slab Rat, a razor-sharp, highly comic novel of lethal ambition and office politics. Zachary Arlen Post is an up-and-coming editor at It magazine, one of the glossiest jewels in the glittery publishing crown of Versailles Publishing. The son of a well-regarded architect and an eccentric Palm Beach socialite, Zack was educated at an exclusive boarding school and has studied at Colgate, Berkeley, and Liverpool University. He is an excellent golfer and has a talent for translating Plautus from the original Latin. Or maybe not. He is really Allen Zachary Post, the son of a garment-center bookkeeper from Queens and a pool-supply salesman from Long Island. But for Zack, his background is too prosaic for a slightly lazy but very ambitious magazine editor who wants to move up at It. Even though Zack has concocted a background that is more in keeping with the privileged world he wants to be a part of than the truth, his ascent up the masthead has stalled: Try though he might -- and maybe he's too lazy to try that hard -- he just cannot seem to get promoted. Enter Mark Larkin, a determined, Harvard-educated hire who understands how the corporate game is played. Mark says the right things, he lunches with the right people, and he pitches the right stories. A snob thriving in a world of snobs, he begins to get noticed, and, to Zack's dismay, is promoted quickly. Zack realizes that something must be done. Mark Larkin must be destroyed. To complicate his life further, Zack finds himself involved with two women. One is a cool (or is she just ice cold?) English beauty with a hyphenated last name and vague family connections to Winston Churchill. The other is an eager, sweet-natured intern whose father is the magazine's barracuda corporate counsel. Zack is torn between the style (and hyphen) of one and the good-natured substance of the other. In Slab Rat, Ted Heller uses the magazine industry as a laboratory in which to dissect human nature. He has written a biting, outrageous story of how the rats that battle for dominance amid New York's skyscrapers -- or "slabs" -- survive and triumph, and the price they must pay to win. Full of dark comedy and a ruthless satire of office life (and death), Slab Rat is a novel rich with the wicked pleasures of the heart.

A common man’s journey... YOUR ROAD MAP TO ACHIEVING FINANCIAL FREEDOM AND LIVING YOUR DREAMS Financial freedom is not defined by your net worth or your social status. It does not matter how much you earn – what matters is how much you can save and invest wisely. The secret to financial freedom is learning the basic concepts of planning well and adopting the right attitude. But how does one achieve this? Written by a common man for the common man, this book will help you lead a financially independent and conscious life. Everyone around us is trapped in a mindless rat race. If you’ve resolved to take control of your finances and construct a personal finance plan, From the Rat Race to Financial Freedom is a good starting point.

Gangs, killers, and vampires. One war-torn detective is the only hope of survival for a crime-ridden orbiting city... Blade Runner meets Se7en in this gritty five-story collection from New York Times and USA Today Bestselling author Anthony Ryan. Alex McLeod paid dearly during the war for independence from Earth. It left the detective disfigured, jaded, and alone. In the aftermath of victory, Alex seethes as criminal factions and cold-blooded killers clash over control of the newly-liberated confederation. In his crusade for justice in the free states, he's willing to break more than a few rules along the way... The only home Alex knows is the slums of Slab, an orbiting city teeming with lowlifes, back-stabbers, and gene-spliced monstrosities. From the grimy streets of his city to the lawless Asteroid Belt, Alex goes toe-to-toe with a sharp-clawed vigilante, a mythical serial killer, and a gorgeous vampire with an ominous message. His quest won't end until his homeland earns the freedom it was promised... But even Alex may not be able to stop the impending Reckoning and a voyage to the one place he swore he'd never return: Earth... Slab City Blues: The Collected Stories contains four exciting novellas and one sensational novel set in a world of hard-boiled sci-fi and cyberpunk. If you like hard-nosed detectives, futuristic planets, and pulse-pounding action, then you'll love Anthony Ryan's world of vampires, werewolves, and space.

"Based on the Xbox 360 video game series from Epic Games/Microsoft Game Studios."

This work, divided into two volumes, is the study of the history of words in the Austronesian (An) languages—their origin in Proto-Austronesian (PAn) or at later stages and how they developed into the forms that are attested in the current An languages. A study of their history entails the reconstruction of the sound system (phonology) of PAn and an exposition of the sound laws (rules) whereby the original sounds changed into those attested in the current An languages. The primary aim of this work is to examine exhaustively the forms that can be reconstructed for PAn and also for the earliest stage after the An languages began to spread southward from Taiwan. For the later stages—that is, forms that can be traced no further back than to the proto-languages of late subgroups, we do not attempt to be exhaustive but confine ourselves to only some of the forms that are traceable to those times, treating those that figure prominently in the literature on historical An linguistics or those that have special characteristics important for understanding in general how forms arose and the processes that led to change. In short, the aim of this study is not just to reconstruct protomorphemes and order the reflexes according to the entries they fit under, but rather to account for the history of each fom1 that is attested and explain what happened historically to yield the attestations. Volume 2 of the Proto-Austronesian Phonology is divided into four parts and contains a glossary, finder lists from the English translation, a bibliography, and an index.

Rat City was just a myth, until she fell face-first into it... Dalia deals in secrets and information. It guarantees her what equates to a charmed life among the ashes and ruin of Curr. But that alone isn't enough to save her from the culling that has slowly wiped out what is left of the city’s human population.

Arterial chemoreceptors are unique structures which continuously monitor changes in arterial blood oxygen, carbon dioxide, glucose, and acid. Alterations in these gases are almost instantaneously sensed by arterial chemoreceptors and relayed into a physiological response which restores blood homeostasis. Arterial Chemoreception contains updated material regarding the physiology of the primary arterial chemoreceptor; the carotid body. Moreover, this book also explores tantalizing evidence regarding the contribution of the aortic bodies, chromaffin cells, lung neuroepithelial bodies, and brainstem areas involved in monitoring changes in blood gases. Furthermore this collection includes data showing the critical importance of these chemoreceptors in the pathophysiology of human disease and possible therapeutic treatments. This book is a required text for any researcher in the field of arterial chemoreception for years to come. It is also a critical text for physicians searching for bench-to-bedside treatments for heart failure, sleep apnea, and pulmonary hypertension.