The planet Karna has suffered for generations under the rule of the corrupt High Kings. Pollution fills the seas. Mountains have been toppled. Deserts encase much of the land.It is to this world Light calls Raphael to be the first Conrad: a human gifted with the power to call and transform energy. Yet Raphael will not follow Light alone, others will join him and Conrad Communities will be formed."Callings: Tales of the Conrads of Karna" reveals the trials and struggles of the Conrads as they battle to heal their homeworld. Within these pages you will journey with Raphael, Bruner, Serenity, and the other Conrads of Karna as they find the strength to follow and obey the Light for the betterment of their planet.

My life has been one of butts: dainty butts, stinky butts, huge butts, soft butts, and even puckered butts. All these have touched my life and depressed my coils. I am a couch, and this is my tale. A Tale of Butts: The Story of a Couch is a novel befitting The Simpsons/Robot Chicken generations. Adult humor marks this tale of a couch and all the butts it intimately comes to know.

The third novel in The Conrad Chronicles series finds Gloria of the House of Vasilis married to Ambassador Arsilin Lucas and living on Earth. While she bears and raises three children with the assistance of her loyal friend Hobbs, her brother, Zeplan, is aboard the Galactic Falcon, endeavoring to foil Xavier of the House of Baldemar's plans to eradicate all the humans living on the planet Karna. Unfortunately Gloria and Zeplan don't know that Xavier has located Gloria and arrived on Earth to challenge her to Death Duel in order to absorb her Light-given abilities. What Xavier doesn't know is that The Chosen One, Gloria's youngest child, Lucy, has been born, and that this seven year old girl will change all his plans.

Lucy Gloria Vasilis Lucas struggles to accept her new life. She no longer is seen as the daughter of Ambassador Arsilin Lucas, the child who witnessed her mother's murder, but is now valued as the daughter of Gloria of the House of Vasilis, a Conrad of the Light, and the Chosen One who is destined to defeat Xavier of the House of Baldemar. At the age of eighteen, Lucy has gone from living at Willow Manor on Earth to living aboard the space ship, the Galactic Falcon. Her life has gone from one of surviving the brutality of the adults around her to being presented with a universe full of options. The magnitude of these sudden changes has sent Lucy's mind into shock. As Lucy adjusts to space living, and slowly accepts she is alive and not delusional, she finds herself trying to accept the concept of being a Conrad, a human able to control energy. In addition, she must get to know her Uncle Zeplan, an uncle she never knew existed until the day he rescued her off of Earth.

Book 2 in the Conrad Chronicles begins with Xavier locked in a thousand cycle Death Duel with Gloria's twin sister Thera. Gloria, Regal, and the other Conrads of the Light struggle to heal the damage Xavier, his Outcasts, and his Carmine army have caused to the planet Karna and her inhabitants. As the Conrads of the Light work at advancing Karna's decimated technology, they come to learn that during Karna's former years, under the reigning High Kings, ships of people left to colonize other planets and head out to learn more while waiting for the Death Duel to end.

For 250 planet cycles the elders concealed their secret: they had been exiled from Karna for using their Conrad abilities. Upon settling the planet Aleron they raised their children and continued to evolve as handlers of energy forces. The Conrads of the Light believed their thriving, peaceful world would endure. When ""the children"" learn of the exile, the Conrad utopian world on Aleron disintegrates. Desiring to become the next Conrad leader, Xavier of the House of Baldemar craves vengeance. He convinces several of his peers to follow him on his quest to annihilate the humans of Karna. Meanwhile, Gloria of the House of Vasilis is assailed by guilt over the questions she asked that sparked Xavier's desire for revenge. Forced into a position of leadership, Gloria is sent by the elders to stop Xavier. Gloria doubts her own abilities, especially when her twin sister chooses to follow Xavier.

Rachel breaks her pencil during a test. Her teacher hands her a short pencil with gnaw marks to use. Disgusted, Rachel attempts to rid herself of the pencil, but it keeps returning. She soon discovers it possesses a talent she does not have: the ability to tell stories.

The beloved debut novel about an affluent Indian family forever changed by one fateful day in 1969, from the author of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • MAN BOOKER PRIZE WINNER Compared favorably to the works of Faulkner and Dickens, Arundhati Roy’s modern classic is equal parts powerful family saga, forbidden love story, and piercing political drama. The seven-year-old twins Estha and Rahel see their world shaken irrevocably by the arrival of their beautiful young cousin, Sophie. It is an event that will lead to an illicit liaison and tragedies accidental and intentional, exposing “big things [that] lurk unsaid” in a country drifting dangerously toward unrest. Lush, lyrical, and unnerving, The God of Small Things is an award-winning landmark that started for its author an esteemed career of fiction and political commentary that continues unabated.

Why should we be good? How should we be good? And how might we more deeply understand the moral and ethical failings--splashed across today's headlines--that have not only destroyed individual lives but caused widespread calamity as well, bringing communities, nations, and indeed the global economy to the brink of collapse? In The Difficulty of Being Good, Gurcharan Das seeks answers to these questions in an unlikely source: the 2,000 year-old Sanskrit epic, Mahabharata. A sprawling, witty, ironic, and delightful poem, the Mahabharata is obsessed with the elusive notion of dharma--in essence, doing the right thing. When a hero does something wrong in a Greek epic, he wastes little time on self-reflection; when a hero falters in the Mahabharata, the action stops and everyone weighs in with a different and often contradictory take on dharma. Each major character in the epic embodies a significant moral failing or virtue, and their struggles mirror with uncanny precision our own familiar emotions of anxiety, courage, despair, remorse, envy, compassion, vengefulness, and duty. Das explores the Mahabharata from many perspectives and compares the successes and failures of the poem's characters to those of contemporary individuals, many of them highly visible players in the world of economics, business, and politics. In every case, he finds striking parallels that carry lessons for everyone faced with ethical and moral dilemmas in today's complex world. Written with the flair and seemingly effortless erudition that have made Gurcharan Das a bestselling author around the world--and enlivened by Das's forthright discussion of his own personal search for a more meaningful life--The Difficulty of Being Good shines the light of an ancient poem on the most challenging moral ambiguities of modern life.