Eighteen-year-old Ava has saved the world 152 times--ever since she got her hands on her first console. It's all fun and games, but after a mysterious encounter with not-a-vampire Brad, she discovers that the mythological creatures she's only ever seen in video games are actually totally real. Brad reveals they're alien refugees living among humans--bonus points because Ava finds the guy really, really cute. As she's suddenly thrust into a quest with a surfer wendigo, a friendly manananggal, a telepathic nine-tailed fox, a Sudoku-loving centaur, and a huggable Bigfoot, Ava embarks on an actual mission to fend off an alien invasion--and she soon realizes that this time, she just might need to save the world for real. Where's a save point when you need one?

...lies understanding. This is what bestselling author Warren Farrell discovered when he took a stand against established views of the male role in society, and pursued o course of study to find out who men really are. Here are the eye-opening, heart-rending, and undeniably enlightening results...

"An impressive and important cross-cultural study that has vast implications for history, religion, anthropology, folklore, and other fields. . . . Remarkably wide-ranging and extremely well-documented, it covers (among much else) the following: medieval Christian legends such as the 14th-century Ethiopian Gadla Hawaryat (Contendings of the Apostles) that had their roots in Parthian Gnosticism and Manichaeism; dog-stars (especially Sirius), dog-days, and canine psychopomps in the ancient and Hellenistic world; the cynocephalic hordes of the ancient geographers; the legend of Prester John; Visvamitra and the Svapacas ("Dog-Cookers"); the Dog Rong ("warlike barbarians") during the Xia, Shang, and Zhou periods; the nochoy ghajar (Mongolian for "Dog Country") of the Khitans; the Panju myth of the Southern Man and Yao "barbarians" from chapter 116 of the History of the Latter Han and variants in a series of later texts; and the importance of dogs in ancient Chinese burial rites. . . . Extremely well-researched and highly significant."—Victor H. Mair, Asian Folklore Studies

The "Vínland Map" first surfaced on the antiquarian market in 1957 and the map's authenticity has been hotly debated ever since—in controversies ranging from the anomalous composition of the ink and the map's lack of provenance to a plethora of historical and cartographical riddles. Maps, Myths, and Men is the first work to address the full range of this debate. Focusing closely on what the map in fact shows, the book contains a critique of the 1965 work The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation; scrutinizes the marketing strategies used in 1957; and covers many aspects of the map that demonstrate it is a modern fake, such as literary evidence and several scientific ink analyses performed between 1967 and 2002. The author explains a number of the riddles and provides evidence for both the identity of the mapmaker and the source of the parchment used, and she applies current knowledge of medieval Norse culture and exploration to counter widespread misinformation about Norse voyages to North America and about the Norse world picture.

A detailed look at language-related myths that explores both what we know and how we know it.

A collection of myths from many cultures.

This book studies some important myths of masculinity in various popular genres, including the western, the horror film, rock music and pornography. The author argues that popular culture gives us highly complex and ambivalent images of men. The hero turns into the anti-hero; feminine and homoerotic material leak in; the male is often shown as the victim. Attention is also paid to important theoretical issues in gender studies and cultural studies, such as identification and the relation between subject and text.