Your holiday season is about to get deliciously naughty!The bad boys and girls of the Winterland are back for the conclusion of Alice and Scrooge's story. This tale is mad, dark, twisted, sexy, and nothing like the legend you know.Life for Alice Liddell should be normal. Work, family, and her general sucky life back at her parent's house, working as a slutty-looking elf in Santa's shop. But from the moment Alice wakes up from a terrible fevered dream, nothing feels ordinary.With visions of strange creatures, an obsession with creating top hats until her hands bleed, and an inexplicable attraction to her married neighbor, Matt, she feels like she's going crazy.When her illusions of twin elves, singing penguins, and sexy reindeers start to turn into full blown hallucinations, her family feels they have no choice but to find her help.Her therapist is Matt's wife, Jessica Winters, someone Alice feels in her gut she shouldn't trust. But he more Alice loses her touch on reality, the more her parents turn to Jessica.In one night, Alice loses everything, landing her in an insane asylum where she learns Jessica is not at all who she seems. As Alice's mind cracks further, her visions feel more like memories.She's in a fight for her life against the mad ruler of the institution. Except who will believe her? She's the insane one, the one who gets visits by ghosts of holiday icons.But one thing good about going mad? In some places being bonkers is exactly what you need...To ascend from the madness.

Your holiday season is about to get deliciously naughty...What if Alice Liddell's story didn't happen the way you think? What if it wasn't Wonderland she fell into, but Winterland.This mad tale is dark, twisted, sexy, and nothing like the legend you know.After losing her job and finding her boyfriend/boss cheating on her with her replacement, twenty-five-year-old Alice Liddell has moved back home to save money and regroup.She doesn't think things can get worse until her younger, more responsible sister, Dinah, gets her a job-as a Christmas elf.Dressed in a slutty costume with fathers peeking down her top and kids vomiting on her, she wants nothing more than to escape the reality of her life.When she sees a sexy, shirtless man, carrying a glowing red light, and bearing antlers, her curiosity gets the better of her. But following him might be the biggest mistake she ever made.Falling into another realm, Alice finds herself in the world of holiday legends and fairytales. But she is not prepared her for the dark madness of this place. Nothing is what is seems and no one is what they are in the fairytales.Even the mysterious, sexy Scrooge.Welcome to Winterland, where the good guys from the North Pole have gone bad, and the only way to survive is to descend into its madness.

Over a millennium ago, Erna, a seismically active yet beautiful world was settled by colonists from far-distant Earth. But the seemingly habitable planet was fraught with perils no one could have foretold. The colonists found themselves caught in a desperate battle for survival against the fae, a terrifying natural force with the power to prey upon the human mind itself, drawing forth a person's worst nightmare images or most treasured dreams and indiscriminately giving them life. Twelve centuries after fate first stranded the colonists on Erna, mankind has achieved an uneasy stalemate, and human sorcerers manipulate the fae for their own profit, little realizing that demonic forces which feed upon such efforts are rapidly gaining in strength. Now, as the hordes of the dark fae multiply, four people—Priest, Adept, Apprentice, and Sorcerer—are about to be drawn inexorably together for a mission which will force them to confront an evil beyond their imagining, in a conflict which will put not only their own lives but the very fate of humankind in jeopardy.

April 2, 2018 was the 50th anniversary of a 1968 premiere screening in Washington, D.C. of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film remains the most fascinating cinematographic adventure given to experience. As a tribute to the masterpiece, and to the maestro himself, this essay which was first presented in 1995 as a scholarly paper explores the multiple connections to the Odyssean theme that one may find in Stanley Kubrick's filmography. Kubrick's unweaving and re-weaving of the cinematographic tapestry reflect his attachment to the changeability implied in the Odyssean theme, which has become the theme of questioning, the perpetual questioning of one's possibilities. The camera's shuttling back and forth in time, round and round in space, through the means of dolly movements, shots and reverse shots, circular and spiraling recurrences, equates the director's shuttling between classical and avant-garde techniques, between painting and photography, between musical intensity and spatial silence. A chassé-croisé which the pluricephal director utilizes with a view to producing new angles of view and new parallaxes: a constant Kubrickian experimentation of the cinematographic language.

Enter Wednesday's World of Darkness. The world saw her as a monster in the making. They were wrong. Merlina wasn't changing, she was ascending. The shadows had always been Merlina's sanctuary, until the day she Frigsday and Wednesday who offer her a chance to reach her full potential.

"Originally serialized in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of Astounding stories"--Copyright page.

The 10th anniversary edition, with new chapters on the crash, Chimerica, and cryptocurrency "[An] excellent, just in time guide to the history of finance and financial crisis." —The Washington Post "Fascinating." —Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek In this updated edition, Niall Ferguson brings his classic financial history of the world up to the present day, tackling the populist backlash that followed the 2008 crisis, the descent of "Chimerica" into a trade war, and the advent of cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, with his signature clarity and expert lens. The Ascent of Money reveals finance as the backbone of history, casting a new light on familiar events: the Renaissance enabled by Italian foreign exchange dealers, the French Revolution traced back to a stock market bubble, the 2008 crisis traced from America's bankruptcy capital, Memphis, to China's boomtown, Chongqing. We may resent the plutocrats of Wall Street but, as Ferguson argues, the evolution of finance has rivaled the importance of any technological innovation in the rise of civilization. Indeed, to study the ascent and descent of money is to study the rise and fall of Western power itself.

In "Deconstructing Periodization," Tia DeNora examines how historical depictions of Beethoven's work in late eighteenth-century Vienna. K. M. Knittel have tended to impose patterns rather than reveal them. When perceived through modern sociological and ethnographic methods, Beethoven's early career is neither as neat nor as evolutionary as often supposed. K. M. Knittel also looks critically at traditional assumptions in "Imitation, Individuality, and Illness: Behind Beethoven's Three Styles." Two of Beethoven's most beloved piano sonatas are placed in wider cultural contexts by Janet Schmalfeldt and Thomas Sipe. Schmalfeldt examines "Form as the Process of Becoming: The Beethoven-Hegelian Tradition and the 'Tempest' Sonata: and Sipe considers the critical reception of op. 57 in "Beethoven, Shakespeare, and the 'Appassionata'." Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is his most famous, sometimes, it seems, too famous to be heard afresh. But Richard Taruskin identifies a potential borrowing in "Something New about the Fifth." And, drawing on Beethoven's sketches, Alain Frogley demonstrates subtle connections between rhythmic patterns and tonal plan in" Beethoven's Struggle for Simplicity in the Sketches for the Third Movement of the Sixth Symphony." In "Florestan Reading Fidelio," Christopher Reynolds clarifies how Romantic composers trod the narrow path between emulating great composers and expressing themselves originally. Reynolds looks at Brahms and Wagner, among others, with special attention to Schumann's studies of Fidelio. In "Beethoven with or without Kunstgepräng': Metrical Ambiguity Reconsidered," . William Rothstein contributes a precise analysis of one of Beethoven's complex compositional techniques.

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY VULTURE! "You've gotta read Ascension by Nicholas Binge. Old-school creepy. . .five-star horror."—Stephen King "Smartly paced, deploying twists and turns strategically to keep the reader moving. . . The ideas are big and the journey is a whole lot of fun." —The New York Times "[An] excellent page-turner. . . a macabre, escapist pleasure for the thoughtful set.”—The Wall Street Journal A mind-bending speculative thriller in which the sudden appearance of a mountain in the middle of the Pacific Ocean leads a group of scientists to a series of revelations that challenge the notion of what it means to be human The only way out is up. . . An enormous snow-covered mountain has appeared in the Pacific Ocean. No one knows when exactly it showed up, precisely how big it might be, or how to explain its existence. When Harold Tunmore is contacted by a shadowy organization to help investigate, he has no idea what he is getting into as he and his team set out for the mountain. The higher Harold’s team ascends, the less things make sense. Time moves differently, turning minutes into hours, and hours into days. Amid the whipping cold of higher elevation, the climbers’ limbs numb and memories of their lives before the mountain begin to fade. Paranoia quickly turns to violence among the crew, and slithering, ancient creatures pursue them in the snow. Still, as the dangers increase, the mystery of the mountain compels them to its peak, where they are certain they will find their answers. Have they stumbled upon the greatest scientific discovery known to man or the seeds of their own demise? Framed by the discovery of Harold Tunmore’s unsent letters to his family and the chilling and provocative story they tell, Ascension considers the limitations of science and faith and examines both the beautiful and the unsettling sides of human nature.

Jack Olsen, "the master of the true crime book,"* now gives us an incisive, probing look into the creation and development of the criminal mind, as well as a shocking case of justice gone awry. From childhood, McDonald Smith took to heart the lessons drummed into him by antisocial relatives and peers. As a teenager, unburdened by conscience or pity, he experimented with child abuse and bestiality, then moved on to larceny, stickups, incest, and, finally, rape. Warned by a "witch" that he was about to be arrested, he fled Los Angeles for Seattle and the Northwest -- already the breeding ground of predatory monsters like Ted Bundy, Kenneth Bianchi, and the Green River Killer. There, for years, he stalked the women of Seattle, seeking his prey on the dark streets and in the quiet homes, then returning to his wife and family: too careful -- and too clever -- to be caught. By fall 1980, Mac Smith's luck still held. A respectable young businessman named Steve Titus found himself charged with one of Smith's most sadistic rapes in a nightmarish case of mistaken identity and injustice. The idealistic Titus was certain that the American system of justice would clear him -- right up to the day that a jury of his peers returned a verdict of guilty as charged. While Mac Smith continued to terrorize the women of Seattle, Titus lost everything: his reputation, his job, his loved ones, his freedom. It was only when a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter answered Titus's pleas for justice that the terrible truth emerged: a truth that was darker than anyone imagined. Predator is a gripping work of true crime reporting: Jack Olsen doing what he does best. It is a searing study of violations: of women, of justice, of power, and of the human spirit. *Jonathan Kellerman Review: With careful reporting that sticks close to the facts, Jack Olsen tells stories that seem straight out of crime fiction, and yet are all the more compelling for being true. This book focuses on three men--a criminal who preyed on women, a carefree partygoer who was wrongly convicted of the predator's crimes, and a reporter for the Seattle Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for tracking down the truth. It's supposed to be a rare event in the U.S. judicial system that someone this innocent gets screwed this badly. Even if it only happened to one person every decade, it would still be a horrible thing. And the smiling rapist, described as having a sweet "Jesus-like" countenance, knowingly allowed that to happen. Olsen not only delivers a real page-turner, but he ties up all the loose ends before the book's memorable and satisfying finale.