It’s no longer cosplay when the game gets real. Maisie is feeling glum about her cosplay and her prospects with a certain cosplaying MinVid celebrity when she is kidnapped. Thinking it’s a gym-bro gone too far, she realizes the game is very real when he steps through a portal and transports her to another realm. Scottie isn’t about to let a very real orc take off with Maisie. Shifting into his berserker form, he runs after her, only to get trapped inside a video game. They have to work together to stay alive, and hope their friends can rescue them. Only Maisie doesn’t want to return to the real world if it means losing Scottie’s affection. You don’t choose the berserker life. The berserker life chooses you.

In a whirlwind fusion of fantasy and reality, magic portals rupture, thrusting creatures from video game realms into our world. Modern-day followers of Odin and gamer Vikings—Vik, Wolf, and Scottie—are propelled into a realm where cosplay transcends imagination, and Viking avatars are forced to shape-shift for battle. Join the adrenaline-fueled journey as love intertwines with danger in this captivating trilogy: Bear: Aaliyah's acceptance of Vik's invitation leads to a perilous revelation, where danger and desire collide in a heart-pounding quest for truth. Wolf: Yeardley's programming prowess is put to the ultimate test in a battle of epic proportions, igniting a fiery passion amidst the chaos. Boar: As Maisie falls prey to a real orc's clutches, Scottie rushes to her aid only to discover they must navigate perilous challenges in a video game realm, where the lines between reality and fantasy blur, and the prospect of losing each other looms large. In this gripping collection, where "you don't choose the berserker life, the berserker life chooses you," immerse yourself in the thrilling union of magic, adventure, and love. Get ready for a rollercoaster ride of gamer romance, shape-shifting Vikings, and paranormal passion that will leave you breathless. For readers who enjoy Zoe Chant and Meg Ripley

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.

The Viking King Authun leads his men on a raid against an Anglo-Saxon village. Men and women are killed indiscriminately but Authun demands that no child be touched. He is acting on prophecy. A prophecy that tells him that the Saxons have stolen a child from the Gods. If Authun, in turn, takes the child and raises him as an heir, the child will lead his people to glory. But Authun discovers not one child, but twin baby boys. Ensuring that his faithful warriors, witnesses to what has happened, die during the raid Authun takes the children and their mother home, back to the witches who live on the troll wall. And he places his destiny in their hands. And so begins a stunning multi-volume fantasy epic that will take a werewolf from his beginnings as the heir to a brutal Viking king, down through the ages. It is a journey that will see him hunt for his lost love through centuries and lives, and see the endless battle between the wolf, Odin and Loki - the eternal trickster - spill over into countless bloody conflicts from our history, and over into our lives. This is the myth of the werewolf as it has never been told before and marks the beginning of an extraordinary new fantasy series from Gollancz.

The Hávamál is a Norse mythology book containing a collection of ancient Norse wisdom. Thought to have been written down in about 1270 CE. The title, Hávamál, translates as "Sayings of Har." Har is the High One, another name for Odin. So they are the "Sayings of the High One." These sayings are a collection of poetry, offering insights and wisdom to help one lead a good life.

"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.

Capitola, Moo, and Shar are the halfling ladies of Triptych: supernatural private investigators who get paid to clean up paranormal messes. Normally Cappie doesn't take human cases, but who can resist a priest, missing Catholic school girls, and a creature that may or may not be the Prince of Darkness? Enjoy Cassandra Jean's manga adaptation of Nicole Peeler's hilarious short story originally published by Orbit!

Rick Riordan's Norse hero faces his greatest challenge yet in the final instalment of the series. Loki the trickster god is free from his chains. Now he's readying Naglfar, the Ship of the Dead, armed with a host of giants and zombies, to sail against the Norse gods and begin the final battle of Ragnarok. It's up to Magnus Chase and his friends to stop Loki's plans, but to do so they will have to sail across the oceans of Midgard, Jotunheim and Niflheim in a desperate race to reach Naglfar before it's ready to sail on Midsummer's Day. Along the way, they will face angry sea gods, hostile giants, and an evil fire-breathing dragon who happens to be a former acquaintance. But Magnus's biggest challenge will be facing his own inner demons. To defeat Loki, Magnus will need to use words, not force. This will require finding a magical elixir so deadly that it will either make Magnus Chase powerful enough to out-talk the silver-tongued Loki, or destroy Magnus utterly.