Enjoy this free introductory story to the Berserker Boys romance trilogy. When her friend’s celebrity crush, in full Viking cosplay, sits down for lunch at the same restaurant, Aaliyah is determined to introduce her friend to the man. Instant attraction turns to anger, and instead of asking for an introduction, she sees red. Aaliyah challenges Vik, with his piercing blue eyes, on the meaning of his tattoos. Given a chance and a lot of charm and convincing, Vik hastily explains the true meaning of his marks. He invites Aaliyah and her friends to come see what he means. Vik had already chosen to embrace his Viking persona for game-play when magic forced the shift on him. Magical forces, using the power of online video gaming, are opening portals between worlds. That same magic causes Vik and his friends to shift into their berserker forms when called to do battle against invading hordes of orcs and goblins. It was supposed to be an afternoon of fun and mayhem, but Vik realizes too late, he may have put the feisty, beautiful Aaliyah in danger. Cosplay takes on a whole new meaning when Viking gamers have the power to shape shift. You don’t choose the berserker life. The berserker life chooses you.

"The perfect novel for anyone looking to dip a toe into the dark side." - Bookie Nookie Reviews I just witnessed a mob hit. The lighter flicks like the sound of a gunshot. Smoke from his cigarette slips through the cracks of my hiding place. His dark chuckle haunts future nightmares I'll never get to have. Please walk away. Please. The sound of a zipper...and then his voice: "Faith Jacobson. 580 Flatbush Avenue. Brooklyn." He's got my wallet. My driver's license. He knows who I am. It's over for me. He flings open the lid of the dumpster. The nearby streetlight illuminates me, and suddenly he decides I'm not dying tonight. No, I am now to become a gift... to his even deadlier brother. I just became the property of Leo Raspallo. Originally published April 17th, 2013. This is a standalone contemporary Dark Romance. Includes NEW Bonus Epilogue.

After Jack becomes apprenticed to a Druid bard, he and his little sister Lucy are captured by Viking Berserkers and taken to the home of King Ivar the Boneless and his half-troll queen, leading Jack to undertake a vital quest to Jotunheim, home of the trolls.

In a crucial shift within posthumanistic media studies, Bernhard Siegert dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations that reproduce, displace, process, and reflect the distinctions fundamental for a given culture. Cultural Techniques aims to forget our traditional understanding of media so as to redefine the concept through something more fundamental than the empiricist study of a medium’s individual or collective uses or of its cultural semantics or aesthetics. Rather, Siegert seeks to relocate media and culture on a level where the distinctions between object and performance, matter and form, human and nonhuman, sign and channel, the symbolic and the real are still in the process of becoming. The result is to turn ontology into a domain of all that is meant in German by the word Kultur. Cultural techniques comprise not only self-referential symbolic practices like reading, writing, counting, or image-making. The analysis of artifacts as cultural techniques emphasizes their ontological status as “in-betweens,” shifting from firstorder to second-order techniques, from the technical to the artistic, from object to sign, from the natural to the cultural, from the operational to the representational. Cultural Techniques ranges from seafaring, drafting, and eating to the production of the sign-signaldistinction in old and new media, to the reproduction of anthropological difference, to the study of trompe-l’oeils, grids, registers, and doors. Throughout, Siegert addresses fundamental questions of how ontological distinctions can be replaced by chains of operations that process those alleged ontological distinctions within the ontic. Grounding posthumanist theory both historically and technically, this book opens up a crucial dialogue between new German media theory and American postcybernetic discourses.

In this romantic adventure by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Unleashing, a Norse goddess’s handmaiden and a Viking fight to save the world. “Laurenston is the queen of paranormal romances that mix over-the-top humor, eccentric characters and sexy, crazy plots to produce addictive stories you won’t want to put down.” —RT Book Reviews No one would ever accuse Jace Berisha of having an easy life—considering her husband . . . you know . . . killed her. But that was then! Now she fights for mighty Viking gods with the spectacular and vicious Crows. But things are turning very bad, very quickly because a vengeful, ancient goddess has come into the world with just one thing on her mind—ending it. And the only way they can hope to stop her is if the Crows join forces with their one-time enemies, the Protectors, a Viking Clan created to do nothing but kill every Crow they see. Thankfully, Protector Ski Eriksen is a peace-loving kind of guy. Because the woman he is desperately trying to get close to is the beautiful and not-very-chatty Jace. Battling Nordic clans? Unkillable goddesses? Jace’s mean-spirited dog? None of these things would ever get in the way of a true Viking! Praise for The Undoing “Laurenston adeptly blends humor, romance, and action, her sizable cast fully fleshed out and always entertaining.” —Publishers Weekly “Anything Shelly Laurenston writes is pure, unadulterated fun. The queen of humorous paranormal romances continues to keep her title with her latest series—Call of the Crows. The Undoing is the second installment in this action packed, laugh out loud, sexy as sin series based on Norse mythology.” —Smexy Books

A ruthless Norse warrior will defeat anything standing between him and his beautiful obsession - even Death itself. A millennium ago, Aidan the Fierce lost his heart to the Valkyrie Regin the Radiant, but he was murdered before he could win her. Since then, he has reincarnated into different identities, with his memory of the past buried deep. This time he has returned as Declan Chase, a human soldier bent on exterminating all immortals - including Regin, his newest captive. The proud Northman that Regin still mourns has been replaced by a twisted madman. Once tortured by immortals, Chase now metes out vengeance against them, and he's fixated on her. Regin's only hope is to make him remember her, though she knows that whenever he recovers his memories, history will repeat itself, and he'll be lost to her again. . . .

Stars Without Number is a science fiction role-playing game inspired by the Old School Renaissance and the great fantasy and science-fiction games of the seventies and eighties. * Compatible with most retroclone RPGs * Helps a GM build a sandbox sci-fi game that lets the players leave the plot rails to explore freely * World building resources for creating system-neutral planets and star sectors * 100 adventure seeds and guidelines for integrating them with the worlds you've made * Old-school compatible rules for guns, cyberware, starships, and psionics * Domain rules for experienced characters who want to set up their own colony, psychic academy, mercenary band, or other institution

"Palast is astonishing, he gets the real evidence no one else has the guts to dig up." Vincent Bugliosi, author of None Dare Call it Treason and Helter Skelter Award-winning investigative journalist Greg Palast digs deep to unearth the ugly facts that few reporters working anywhere in the world today have the courage or ability to cover. From East Timor to Waco, he has exposed some of the most egregious cases of political corruption, corporate fraud, and financial manipulation in the US and abroad. His uncanny investigative skills as well as his no-holds-barred style have made him an anathema among magnates on four continents and a living legend among his colleagues and his devoted readership. This exciting collection, now revised and updated, brings together some of Palast's most powerful writing of the past decade. Included here are his celebrated Washington Post exposé on Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris's stealing of the presidential election in Florida, and recent stories on George W. Bush's payoffs to corporate cronies, the payola behind Hillary Clinton, and the faux energy crisis. Also included in this volume are new and previously unpublished material, television transcripts, photographs, and letters.

In this extensively revised third edition of The Viking Age: A Reader, Somerville and McDonald successfully bring the Vikings and their world to life for twenty-first-century students and instructors. The diversity of the Viking era is revealed through the remarkable range and variety of sources presented as well as the geographical and chronological coverage of the readings. The third edition has been reorganized into fifteen chapters. Many sources have been added, including material on gender and warrior women, and a completely new final chapter traces the continuing cultural influence of the Vikings to the present day. The use of visual material has been expanded, and updated maps illustrate historical developments throughout the Viking Age. The English translations of Norse texts, many of them new to this collection, are straightforward and easily accessible, while chapter introductions contextualize the readings.

In Iceland, people do not compose verse just to comfort themselves; they worship poetry and believe in it. In poetry is a power which rules men's lives and health, governs wind and sea. This book contains an account of the various types of Icelandic folk-story, their origins and sources, the folk-beliefs they represent, and their meanings.