Being a dragon is a death sentence. Being a Tasker might be worse. Jean-Michel is BOTH. Jean-Michel Raudine has been his name for centuries, thanks to an oath that bound his dragon soul to a human body. A specialized operative called a Tasker, Jean works for Crimson, the very organization that hunts dragons and kills them on sight. What better place to hide than among your enemy? Gabriel Kennedy is a well-known businessman with secrets - one of which is that he’s a Councilor in the supernatural justice system. He decides the fate of paranormal beings that break the laws of Crimson. What will he do when he realizes his Tasker is breaking the law by simply existing? Life for the dragon Tasker has become one hideous mission after another. Life for the human Councilor is one lonely meeting after another. That is until doppelgängers are discovered in this world, and powerful people begin acting strangely, even dangerously. Are doppelgängers responsible for something sinister? With lives on the line, Jean-Michel finds himself walking a tightrope to help Gabriel solve the mystery before the Council & Crimson fall into chaos - while also keeping his scaled ass from being found out or worse - killed. Doppelgängers & Deceit is Book One of The Dragon Tasker Series. It's a wild urban fantasy and paranormal romance that introduces you to a chorus of paranormal characters connected to a dejected dragon and introverted human trying to solve not only the mystery surrounding the doppelgängers but are also piecing their own puzzle together.

David Blue and his girlfriend Deanne Byrd are ready for a peaceful Labor Day party at his farm in Port Clinton, Ohio. Theyve invited five of their friends from college to share in the festivities, but events take a strange turn when a freak blizzard descends upon the peaceful Midwestern countryside. Trapped at the farm, unexpected guests soon appear, people definitely not invited. David believes one of the arrivals is actually his doppelgnger his evil twinhere to destroy David and his friends. But is the doppelgnger real or is David suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder? Can David convince his friends that there really is a doppelgnger in the house, or will they just think him mad? When guests begin to disappear, the tension increases, and no one knows whom to trust. Has David led his friends into a death trap? If so, he is the only person who can save them from his own worst enemy.

Eight outre tales of the doubly weird by J. Sheridan LeFanu, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Algernon Blackwood, Guy de Maupassant, Honore de Balzac, Hans Christian Andersen, Henry James, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. . . . The face in the mirror is yours, but ever so slightly different. A shadow haunts your house, but it walks in places you've never gone. You grew up with a boy who had your face and your name, except he always did everything right, while you never could. Evil twins, double images: these are the tales of the Doppelganger.

Bizarro has a problem. The cloning technology he received from Lex Luthor worked a little too well. Instead creating a few duplicates to keep him company on his home world, Bizarro created 100 doppelgängers -- and they've all turned against him. With nowhere to turn, Bizarro asks the world's greatest super heroes -- including Superman, Supergirl, Batman, and Wonder Woman -- for help. Can the Justice League take down Bizarro's doppelgängers of doom? Or will Bizarro World collapse under complete clone chaos?

The Bible says that YHWH alone is God and that there is none like him—but texts and artwork from antiquity show that many gods looked very similar. In this volume, scholars of the Hebrew Bible and its historical contexts address the problem of YHWH’s ancient look-alikes, providing recommendations for how Jews and Christians can think theologically about this challenge. Sooner or later, whether in a religion class or a seminary course, students bump up against the fact that God—the biblical God—was one among other, comparable gods. The ancient world was full of gods, including great gods of conquering empires, dynastic gods of petty kingdoms, goddesses of fertility, and personal spirit guardians. And in various ways, these gods look like the biblical God. Like the God of the Bible, they, too, controlled the fates of nations, chose kings, bestowed fecundity and blessing, and cared for their individual human charges. They spoke and acted. They experienced wrath and delight. They inspired praise. All of this leaves Jews and Christians in a bind: how can they confess that the God named YHWH was (and is) the true and living God, in view of this God’s profound similarities to all these others? The essays in this volume address the theological challenge these parallels create, providing reflections on how Jews and Christians can keep faith in YHWH as God while acknowledging the reality of YHWH’s divine doppelgängers. It will be welcomed by undergraduates studying religion; seminarians and graduate students of Bible, theology, and the ancient world; and adult education classes.

#1 NATIONAL BESTELLER Winner of the 2024 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction Finalist for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism Shortlisted for the 2024 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize (part of the BC and Yukon Book Prizes) A New York Times Notable Book of 2023 Vulture’s #1 Book of 2023 A Guardian Best Ideas Book of 2023 Named a Best Book of the Year by The Globe and Mail • TIME • Esquire • Slate • Harpers’ Bazaar • The Times • The New Republic • Toronto Star • CBC • The Boston Globe • Electric Lit What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you'd devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, Naomi Klein had just such an experience—she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were similar enough to her own that many people confused her for the other. For a vertiginous moment, she lost her bearings. And then she got interested, in a reality that seems to be warping and doubling like a digital hall of mirrors. It’s happening in our politics as New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers find common cause with fire-breathing far right propagandists (all in the name of protecting “the children”). It’s happening in our culture as AI gobbles up music, paintings, fiction and everything in between and spits out imitations that threaten to overtake the originals. And it’s happening to many of us as individuals as we create digital doubles of ourselves, filtered and curated just so for all the other duplicates to see. An award-winning journalist, bestselling author, public intellectual and activist, Naomi Klein writes books that orient us in our time. She has offered essential accounts of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Now, as liberal democracies teeter on the edge, Klein takes aim at absurdist authoritarianism, using a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the doubles that haunt us. Part tragicomic memoir, part chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Doppelganger invites readers on a wild ride, smashing through the mirror world, charting a path beyond despair towards true solidarity.

William Sims Bainbridge Virtual worlds are persistent online computer-generated environments where people can interact, whether for work or play, in a manner comparable to the real world. The most prominent current example is World of Warcraft (Corneliussen and Rettberg 2008), a massively multiplayer online game with 11 million s- scribers. Some other virtual worlds, notably Second Life (Rymaszewski et al. 2007), are not games at all, but Internet-based collaboration contexts in which people can create virtual objects, simulated architecture, and working groups. Although interest in virtual worlds has been growing for at least a dozen years, only today it is possible to bring together an international team of highly acc- plished authors to examine them with both care and excitement, employing a range of theories and methodologies to discover the principles that are making virtual worlds increasingly popular and may in future establish them as a major sector of human-centered computing.