A collection that riffs on the fodder of everyday office life and technology and features the irrepressible clueless Boss, insane co-workers, and the acerbic Dogbert.

“A thought-provoking philosophical text about delusions, war, computers, and the nature of man and God” from the Dilbert creator and author of God’s Debris (Gifted Education International). This frenetically paced sequel to Adams’s bestselling “thought experiment,” God’s Debris, raises questions about the nature of reality and just where our delusions are taking us. With publication of The Religion War, millions of long-time fans of Scott Adams’s Dilbert cartoons and business bestsellers will have to admit that the literary world is a better place with Adams on the loose spreading new ideas and philosophical conundrums. Unlike God’s Debris, which was principally a dialogue between its two main characters, The Religion War is set several decades in the future when the smartest man in the world steps between international leaders to prevent a catastrophic confrontation between Christianity and Islam. The parallels between where we are today and where we could be in the near future are clear. According to Adams, The Religion War targets “bright readers with short attention spans—everyone from lazy students to busy book clubs.” But while the book may be a three-hour read, it’s packed with concepts that will be discussed long after, including a list of “Questions to Ponder in the Shower” that reinforce the story’s purpose of highlighting the most important—yet most ignored—questions in the world.

Socialite Sadie Mancini is a horrible judge of men. Case in point: her latest boyfriend has just abandoned her in Albania. Now, to her chagrin, Calan Friese, her sexy new protector, is a self-confessed killer, serious about terrorists and casual about women. Despite their sizzling chemistry, she knows she must leave him before he leaves her. But can she pull off a dangerous escape? To his surprise, the insecure daddy's girl has become braver, bolder and wicked with a weapon. Sure, she's a complication he wasn't counting on, but he enjoys keeping her safe. Perhaps she's just the kind of woman he can get serious about….

This uplifting and honest book shows postgraduate students how their personal values can help them navigate the universe of possibilities they will encounter while doing a doctoral degree. Author Leela Viswanathan takes a “whole person” approach to the PhD experience and addresses typically unconsidered but crucial topics such as self-care, networking, and the non-academic career path. Readers are led through a personalized map of the process: reflective exercises will guide them in identifying their values and then aligning these with their skills, activities, and resources to achieve success on their own terms. This is a must-read for doctoral students, supervisors, and advisors, as well as those considering doing a PhD.

A serious fantasy series that doesn’t take itself seriously. Fred and company find themselves in a new neck of the woods as their path carries them to the elven city of Crutchen filled with the fancy, pointy-eared folk of lore. A welcome surprised awaits their coming, and they have more free time on their hands then they planned. They make use of their new-found leisure time to explore the ins-and-outs, intrigues, plotting, scheming, and deception in the fair city as their adventure sneaks up on them and reminds them that danger lurks just around the corner. KEYWORDS: new adult, mystery, paranormal, supernatural, fantasy, folklore, folktale, folk tale, legend, legends, myth, myths, action adventure, action, adventure, second chances, comedy, humor, horror, free, freebie, free book, free books, book, books, free ebook, ebook, free novel, rich, quick read, read, short, serial, series, college, funny, female protagonist, novel, secret, suspense, thriller, alpha male, literature, story, stories, hero, fiction, box, box set, boxed, boxed set, young adult, teen, historical, past, travel, hero, coming of age, high fantasy, high, sword, sorcery, witches, wizards, fairy tales, magic, sorcerer, romantic fantasy, epic, monster, creature

In a non-shifting alpha/omega society, omegas have become so scarce, they’re sequestered at birth in isolated facilities. Rafael Vargas, cyber expert, is an omega hiding in plain sight. At least until activists recruit him to hack an omega facility and rescue the children. He gets away clean until a prime alpha unwittingly hires him to trace the hack. With his precious freedom at risk, Rafael battles his instinctive attraction to the alpha. Grant Tenereth, an alpha overseeing the omega facilities, is hell-bent on finding the kidnapped children. But from the moment he hires the fascinating but challenging Rafael, Grant finds himself questioning his rock-solid devotion to the rules. When he learns the man is an omega as well as a criminal hacker, he tries to do the right thing for the law, even if it isn’t the right thing for him. Or for the omega. Grant struggles, trapped between duty and desire. Rafael aches for love but fears losing his independence. Will they realize before it’s too late that what they have isn’t just instinct? It’s everything.

Everyone has the same questions about best friends Owen and Luna: What binds them together so tightly? Why weren’t they ever a couple? And why do people around them keep turning up dead? In this riveting novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Passenger, every answer raises a new, more chilling question. “Masterfully plotted, The Accomplice is both a keep-you-guessing mystery and a keenly and tenderly observed character study.”—Attica Locke, author of Bluebird, Bluebird and Heaven, My Home ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022—PopSugar, CrimeReads Owen Mann is charming, privileged, and chronically dissatisfied. Luna Grey is secretive, cautious, and pragmatic. Despite their differences, they form a bond the moment they meet in college. Their names soon become indivisible—Owen and Luna, Luna and Owen—and stay that way even after an unexplained death rocks their social circle. They’re still best friends years later, when Luna finds Owen’s wife brutally murdered. The police investigation sheds light on some long-hidden secrets, but it can’t penetrate the wall of mystery that surrounds Owen. To get to the heart of what happened and why, Luna has to dig up the one secret she’s spent her whole life burying. The Accomplice brilliantly examines the bonds of shared history, what it costs to break them, and what happens when you start wondering how well you know the one person who truly knows you.

An extensive history of how the Bible’s story of Job has been interpreted through the ages. The question that launches Job’s story is posed by God at the outset of the story: “Have you considered my servant Job?” (1:8; 2:3). By any estimation the answer to this question must be yes. The forty-two chapters that form the biblical story have in fact opened the story to an ongoing practice of reading and rereading, evaluating and reevaluating. Early Greek and Jewish translators emphasized some aspects of the story and omitted others; the Church Fathers interpreted Job as a forerunner of Christ, while medieval Jewish commentators debated conservative and liberal interpretations of God’s providential love. Artists, beginning at least in the Greco-Roman period, painted and sculpted their own interpretations of Job. Novelists, playwrights, poets, and musicians—religious and irreligious, from virtually all points of the globe—have added their own distinctive readings. In Have You Considered My Servant Job?, Samuel E. Balentine examines this rich and varied history of interpretation by focusing on the principal characters in the story—Job, God, the satan figure, Job’s wife, and Job’s friends. Each chapter begins with a concise analysis of the biblical description of these characters, then explores how subsequent readers have expanded or reduced the story, shifted its major emphases or retained them, read the story as history or as fiction, and applied the morals of the story to the present or dismissed them as irrelevant. Each new generation of readers is shaped by different historical, cultural, and political contexts, which in turn require new interpretations of an old yet continually mesmerizing story. Voltaire read Job one way in the eighteenth century, Herman Melville a different way in the nineteenth century. Goethe’s reading of the satan figure in Faust is not the same as Chaucer’s in The Canterbury Tales, and neither is fully consonant with the Testament of Job or the Qur’an. One need only compare the descriptions of God in the biblical account with the imaginative renderings by Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Franz Kafka to see that the effort to understand why God afflicts Job “for no reason” (2:3) continues to be both compelling and endlessly complicated. “A tour de force of cultural interaction with the book of Job. He guides today’s reader along the path of Job interpretation, exegesis, adaptation and imagining revealing the sheer variety of themes, meanings, creativity and re-readings that have been inspired by this one biblical book. Balentine shows us that not only is there “always someone playing Job” (MacLeish, J.B.) but there’s always someone, past or present, reading this ever-enigmatic book.” —Katharine J. Dell, University of Cambridge “Balentine “considers Job” for the countless ways this biblical book, in all its rich complexities, has inspired readers over the centuries. . . . Balentine’s volume sparkles with insightful theological commentary and rigorous scholarship, and any exegetical course or study on Job would benefit from it.” —Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology