Does a former mean girl deserve a happy ever after? Heather Combs grew up in Ardor Creek, stuck in a home with zero love or emotional support. In response, she lashed out, becoming a popular but cold ice-queen. Hoping to escape her unstable home, she married her high school boyfriend only to realize she’d entered another emotionally unfulfilling relationship. Convinced she didn’t possess the capacity to love, she divorced her ex and left Ardor Creek. Years later, Jeremy Kramer, a successful author and single dad to twin girls, moves to Ardor Creek and instantly falls for the small-town charm. His busy life leaves little room for love, even if newly-returned former bad girl Heather Combs continually catches his eye. When Heather and Jeremy become neighbors, they quickly realize their chemistry is off the charts. But he’s a dad who prefers serious relationships and she detests feelings. After all, love has never been her forte, but in the hidden corners of her soul, she can’t deny her yearning for her handsome neighbor and his sweet, precocious girls… Welcome back to Ardor Creek! In this series finale, we see a middle-aged, childfree by choice heroine finally get her happy ever after. There are discussions of mental illness, including animal cruelty and childhood hardships, so please consider that before reading. Love is in the air in Ardor Creek for our sexy-geeky author and reformed mean girl. Enjoy! The Ardor Creek Series (also available as audiobooks) #1: Hearts Reclaimed #2: Illusions Unveiled #3: Desires Uncovered #4: Resolutions Embraced #5: Passions Fulfilled #6: Futures Entwined Search terms: later in life romance, childfree by choice heroine, single dad romance, small town romance, later in life romance, complete series, hot romance, steamy romance * * * * If you’re a fan of Lucy Score, Melanie Harlow, Amy Daws, Kayley Loring, Adriana Locke, Claire Kingsley, & Nicole Snow, the Ardor Creek series is perfect for you!

Should digital technology be viewed as a new life form, sharing our ecosystem and coevolving with us? Are humans defining technology, or is technology defining humans? In this book, Edward Ashford Lee considers the case that we are less in control of the trajectory of technology than we think. It shapes us as much as we shape it, and it may be more defensible to think of technology as the result of a Darwinian coevolution than the result of top-down intelligent design. Richard Dawkins famously said that a chicken is an egg's way of making another egg. Is a human a computer's way of making another computer? To understand this question requires a deep dive into how evolution works, how humans are different from computers, and how the way technology develops resembles the emergence of a new life form on our planet. Lee presents the case for considering digital beings to be living, then offers counterarguments. What we humans do with our minds is more than computation, and what digital systems do—be teleported at the speed of light, backed up, and restored—may never be possible for humans. To believe that we are simply computations, he argues, is a “dataist” faith and scientifically indefensible. Digital beings depend on humans—and humans depend on digital beings. More likely than a planetary wipe-out of humanity is an ongoing, symbiotic coevolution of culture and technology.

Does a former mean girl deserve a happy ever after? Heather Combs grew up in Ardor Creek, stuck in a home with zero love or emotional support. In response, she lashed out, becoming a popular but cold ice-queen. Hoping to escape her unstable home, she married her high school boyfriend, only to realize she'd entered into another emotionally unfulfilling relationship. Convinced she didn't possess the capacity to love, she divorced her ex and left Ardor Creek. Years later, Jeremy Kramer, a successful author and single dad to twin girls, moves to Ardor Creek and instantly falls for the small-town charm. His busy life leaves little room for love, even if newly-returned former bad girl Heather Combs continually catches his eye. When Heather and Jeremy become neighbors, they quickly realize their chemistry is off the charts. But he's a dad who prefers serious relationships and she detests feelings. After all, love has never been her forte, but in the hidden corners of her soul, she can't deny her yearning for her handsome neighbor and his sweet, precocious girls... Welcome back to Ardor Creek! In this series finale, we see a middle-aged, childfree by choice heroine finally get her happy ever after. There are discussions of mental illness, including animal cruelty and childhood hardships, so please consider that before reading. Love is in the air in Ardor Creek for our sexy-geeky author and reformed mean girl. Enjoy!

In the postwar years, an eruption of urbanization took place across Japan, from its historical central cities to the outer reaches of the archipelago. During the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese literary and visual media took a deep interest in cities and their problems, and what this rapid change meant for the country. In Residual Futures, Franz Prichard offers a pathbreaking analysis of the works wrought from this intensive urbanization, mapping the ways in which Japanese filmmakers, writers, photographers, and other artists came to grips with the entwined ecologies of a drastic transformation. Residual Futures examines crucial works of documentary film, fiction, and photography that interrogated Japan’s urbanization and integration into the U.S.-dominated geopolitical system. Prichard discusses documentary filmmaker Tsuchimoto Noriaki’s portrait of the urban “traffic war” and the remaking of Tokyo for the 1964 Olympics, novelist Abe Kōbō’s depictions of infrastructure and urban sociality, and the radical notions of landscape that emerge from the critical and photographic work of Nakahira Takuma. His careful readings reveal the shifting relationships among urban materialities and subjectivities and the ecological, political, and aesthetic vocabularies of urban change. A novel cultural history of critical urban discourse in Japan, Residual Futures brings an interdisciplinary approach to Japanese literary and visual media studies. It provides a vital new perspective on the infrastructural aesthetics and entangled urban and media conditions of the global Cold War.

One Woman. Her ultimate desire. The three men who love her. Can they overcome their haunted pasts to give her life she has yearned for? ~All I'd ever wanted was to be loved. I had two men who I cared about and they both loved me in different ways. One gave me the romance that I wanted and the other gave me the thrill that I craved. Separately they gave me what I needed, but I wanted more. I wanted it all. So when my best friend stirred the pot, I knew that these three men could give me a glimpse of everything my heart and soul ever yearned for. Why did I have to choose? None of us realized how deeply my lovers were connected, in ways I couldn't fathom. It should have brought us closer together, or would it all be too much for us to overcome?**Contains scenes of mild BDSM & M/M; M/M/M//F

During a time when legends were born . . .A princess cursed from birth, a loyal knight worthy of being king, and the evil that threatens their love.After growing up on a remote farm, Lis resists pursuing her identity as the rightful heir to the throne of Norvegia. Even as she does her part to thwart a dangerous plot against the king, she resigns herself to a simple life helping her elderly father with the farm and surviving the harsh winter.With the king losing his mind, Sir Ansgar, the highest knight in the land, is desperate to save the sovereign he's sworn to protect. Before Ansgar can uncover what is causing the king's demise, he finds himself falsely accused of treason and dismissed from court. In danger of losing his life, Ansgar takes refuge on Lis's farm. As love blossoms between them, they realize a future together is impossible. Even so, they must unite to save the kingdom from ever-growing forces of evil. Are their destinies entwined? Or will they be ripped apart forever?The real story of Excalibur continues . . .

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “brilliant [and] entrancing” (The Guardian) journey into the hidden lives of fungi—the great connectors of the living world—and their astonishing and intimate roles in human life, with the power to heal our bodies, expand our minds, and help us address our most urgent environmental problems. “Grand and dizzying in how thoroughly it recalibrates our understanding of the natural world.”—Ed Yong, author of An Immense World ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Time, BBC Science Focus, The Daily Mail, Geographical, The Times, The Telegraph, New Statesman, London Evening Standard, Science Friday When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel, and behave. In the first edition of this mind-bending book, Sheldrake introduced us to this mysterious but massively diverse kingdom of life. This exquisitely designed volume, abridged from the original, features more than one hundred full-color images that bring the spectacular variety, strangeness, and beauty of fungi to life as never before. Fungi throw our concepts of individuality and even intelligence into question. They are metabolic masters, earth makers, and key players in most of life’s processes. They can change our minds, heal our bodies, and even help us remediate environmental disaster. By examining fungi on their own terms, Sheldrake reveals how these extraordinary organisms—and our relationships with them—are changing our understanding of how life works. Winner of the Wainwright Prize, the Royal Society Science Book Prize, and the Guild of Food Writers Award • Shortlisted for the British Book Award • Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize

Explores the power of Jewish culture and assesses the perceived threats to the coherence and size of Jewish communities in the United States, Europe, and Israel. 001.

Facing Climate Change explains why people refuse to accept evidence of a warming planet and shows how to move past partisanship to reach a consensus for action. A climate scientist and licensed Jungian analyst, Jeffrey T. Kiehl examines the psychological phenomena that twist our relationship to the natural world and their role in shaping the cultural beliefs that distance us further from nature. He also accounts for the emotions triggered by the lived experience of climate change and the feelings of fear and loss they inspire, which lead us to deny the reality of our warming planet. But it is not too late. By evaluating our way of being, Kiehl unleashes a potential human emotional understanding that can reform our behavior and help protect the Earth. Kiehl dives deep into the human brain's psychological structures and human spirituality's imaginative power, mining promising resources for creating a healthier connection to the environment—and one another. Facing Climate Change is as concerned with repairing our social and political fractures as it is with reestablishing our ties to the world, teaching us to push past partisanship and unite around the shared attributes that are key to our survival. Kiehl encourages policy makers and activists to appeal to our interdependence as a global society, extracting politics from the process and making decisions about our climate future that are substantial and sustaining.

The remarkable story of “outsider” artist Judith Scott, who was institutionalized for more than thirty years before being reunited with her sister From birth, fraternal twins Judith and Joyce Scott lived as if they were one person in two bodies, understanding instinctively what the other wanted and felt, despite the fact that Judy had Down syndrome, profound deafness, and never learned to speak or sign. But this idyllic childhood of color, texture, and feeling ended abruptly when, at age seven, Judy was taken from their shared bed while Joyce slept, not knowing that the wholeness they had known was being shattered. For the next three decades, Joyce is left without her other half and must grieve unexpected loss while navigating her relationship with an emotionally distant mother—alone. Even so, her life parallels her twin’s in surprising ways. While in college, Joyce too is sent away, pressured to relinquish the secret daughter she bore in hiding to adoption. Decades later, Joyce resolves to reunite with her sister and fill their remaining years with joy. After overcoming legal hurdles to become Judy’s legal guardian, she enrolls her in an art center for adults with disabilities in Oakland, California. Judy is hesitant at first, but after two years of uninterested painting and drawing, her untapped creativity suddenly ignites when she is introduced to fiber art, and she begins carefully and intentionally winding yarn and other materials around combinations of found objects. With unflagging intensity, Judy works five days a week for the next eighteen years, producing more than two-hundred astoundingly diverse fiber sculptures. Unconcerned with her growing fame, she remains fully immersed in her artistic vision until her death in 2005. Today, Judith Scott’s work is displayed in museums and galleries around the world, in some of the most prestigious collections of contemporary art. Entwined is a penetrating personal narrative that explores a complex world of disability, loss, reunion, and the resiliency of the human spirit. Part memoir, part biography, Entwined is a poignant and astonishing story about sisters finding their voices in each other’s love and through art.