Human vs. House Fly.... Will the red fly swatter help the person defeat the fly or will the fly prevail?

When all you need is beauty, and the Devil’s serving boy needs you to play dead—with Hella, the Norse Goddess of Death. Ruby Rush lost her face to a fire and has been in hiding ever since. When her best friend brings her a magical mirror, she finds herself through the looking glass with Roger Rok, a demigod son of the Norse God of Love. He’s looking for a berserker sword to stop the end of the world, and in return for her help, promises her a beauty beyond her wildest dreams. But bargains, as well as mirrors and hearts, are made to be broken—especially when Ruby comes face to face with Hella and is whisked away to her icy realm of death. While Ruby fends with Hella, Roger must deal with the conflicting desires of Odin, Loki, Hella, and Freya while a shapeshifting horsefly turned cockatoo leads or misleads them on their journey to stop Ragnarok. Ruby tries to protect her heart, and Roger does his best to charm and protect her into helping him navigate modern day San Francisco. As the end of the world draws near, will Ruby discover that Roger’s professed love is not an illusion? More importantly, will Ruby and Roger find what they’re truly looking for?

A United Nations-brokered détente between North and South Korea is about to make history when two powerful bombs rock Midtown Manhattan, killing the warring nations' representatives as well as innocent bystanders. A renegade North Korean general is behind the violence and, with a political firestorm unleashed on Washington, D.C., Jake Scott is ordered by the president to infiltrate a secret island meeting of the North Korean rulers. Even with his best crew aboard the Reno, Scott is up against a monstrous enemy armed with hair-raising technology: miniaturized nukes stowed on board the Sang-o, or Red Shark -- a sub which handily dodges conventional sonar and satellite detection. The clock is ticking as Scott makes a chilling discovery -- the weapons are poised and ready to bring down Korea's most despised foe: the U.S.A....

Who¿s destroying her life? Nora Jordan is in prison. Who framed her and why? Just weeks before, she was in an aides¿ program at a hospital and her pre-med college career was going famously. She had fallen in love with Rick Barrow, an idealistic political activist, while helping him recover from a brutal police beating during a protest march. Jack Rivers, Rick¿s cynical but loyal roommate, discovers a film of the march ¿ with its startling revelation. Then, a police raid on her apartment, charges of drug dealing, a prison sentence and, worst of all, expulsion from college ¿ destroy her dreams for a career as a doctor. Can Nora rebuild her shattered life and resolve her conflicting romantic feelings for both Rick and Jack? From Boston to New York to Puerto Rico, Jack and Nora, separately and together, pursue daring schemes to expose and defeat their enemies. But can they save Rick, reclaim their own lives and salvage a future together?

These ingenious interviews will amuse, provoke and delight. Veering from the intensely serious to the wildly silly, Dead Interviews grants writers the chance to sit down with their heroes and flex their cerebral muscles, or simply indulge in some bookish gossip with a deceased icon. Pitch-perfect mimesis meets razor sharp literary criticism in the book that refuses to let dead writers lie. The contributors: Rick Moody on Jimi Hendrix, Cynthia Ozick on Henry James, Douglas Coupland on Andy Warhol, Sam Leith on John Berryman, Geoff Dyer on Friedrich Nietzsche, A. M. Homes on Richard Nixon, David Mitchell on Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, John Burnside on Rachel Carson, ZZ Packer on Monsieur de Saint-George, Michel Faber on Marcel Duchamp, Rebecca Miller on the Marquis de Sade, Ian Rankin on Arthur Conan Doyle and Joyce Carol Oates on Robert Frost.

BEST BOOK OF 2023 ACCORDING TO THE NEWSTATESMAN AND OBSERVER 'The Swimmer is a wonderful, original achievement; teeming with stories, glittering with images, and experimental in form and tone' Robert Macfarlane Roger Deakin, author of the immortal Waterlog, was a man of many parts: maverick ad-man, cider-maker, teacher, environmentalist, music promoter and filmmaker. But, above all, he was the restorer of ancient Walnut Tree Farm in Suffolk, the heartland where he wrote about all natural life – with rare attention, intimacy, precision and poetry. Roger Deakin was unique, and so too is this joyful work of creative biography, told primarily in the words of the subject himself, with support from a chorus of friends, family, colleagues and lovers. Delving deep into Deakin’s library of words, Patrick Barkham draws from notebooks, diaries, letters and recordings to conjure his voice back to glorious life in these pages. 'A rich, strange and compelling work of creative memoir that beautifully honours and elevates the life and work of its subject' Alex Preston, Observer