What was supposed to be an upcoming author's dream would turn into a night of hell and become a curse to anyone who happened to glance upon the last writings of author Richard Valance from the unfinished horror novel titled “A Blast from Hell.” It all started when Richard and his jealous publisher got into a heated argument over the phone about finishing his book that went months overdue. Richard's publisher said in an angry voice, "If you don't finish that book tonight you're a dead man, and just to make sure, I'm coming over until you finish the last pen stroke. I've got too much money invested for this novel to die from someone who made a promise to me and did not deliver." "Calm down, it will be finished," said Richard in a voice of confidence. The publisher said, “I'll be right over." The publisher arrived moments later wearing a trench coat with something inside his coat that would be used when the moment was right. The rain was coming down pretty hard, and the thunder, and lightning were intense. The publisher entered Richard's home keeping his jealous thoughts to himself. Richard said, "Come to my study, I only have a couple of pages left, then you can take the manuscript and have it published." "Good, I was hoping this wouldn't take all night," replied the publisher in a mellow tone. As Richard was penning away at the manuscript, the publisher asked Richard, "What kind of paper is that?" "It's human skin," replied Richard. "Why human skin?" asked his publisher. “I was desperate and thought talking to this Witch a friend recommended to me could help keep my mind framed on the right path to finishing this book. The only downside to the fame this novel will bring is after the reader is reading it they will die under mysterious circumstances," explained Richard in a nervous tone. "You believe that?" laughed the publisher. Richard said aloud, "Just a few more pen strokes, and my masterpiece will be done."

More haunting tales of Ghosts, Aliens, Science Fiction, Western, Zombies, Headless Ghosts, Haunted Graveyards, Urban Legends, Curses and Vampires.

Airk Azdajah, the rightful King of the White Clan of dragon shifters, spent half a millennium being tortured by the false High King Pytheios. The only reason he’s alive is a curse: the man who kills Airk will be consumed in his own fire. So Airk was kept alive—barely—and unable to shift in his prison cage, driving the creature half of him into madness. Airk escaped, but he'll never be truly free. Because what good is a king who can never let his feral dragon loose, never fly, and never lead his people? Angelika Amon is the last unmated phoenix. The problem? She has no powers. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Angelika hates being dormant, especially now that her three sisters are blissfully mated to powerful dragon shifter kings and are very much part of the fight to take down the rotting king Pytheios. What good is a completely powerless phoenix in a battle to save the dragon kingdom? Desperate to find some way to help, she offers herself to Airk as a mate—just for political leverage. Now a dormant phoenix is mated to a dragon who can't shift. But the balance of power is about to change when Pytheios decides to claim Angelika for himself... Each book in the Inferno Rising series is STANDALONE: * The Rogue King * The Blood King * The Warrior King * The Cursed King

A humorous, trenchant and fascinating examination of how Western culture's taboo words have evolved over the millennia

The significantly expanded and updated new edition of a widely used text on reinforcement learning, one of the most active research areas in artificial intelligence. Reinforcement learning, one of the most active research areas in artificial intelligence, is a computational approach to learning whereby an agent tries to maximize the total amount of reward it receives while interacting with a complex, uncertain environment. In Reinforcement Learning, Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto provide a clear and simple account of the field's key ideas and algorithms. This second edition has been significantly expanded and updated, presenting new topics and updating coverage of other topics. Like the first edition, this second edition focuses on core online learning algorithms, with the more mathematical material set off in shaded boxes. Part I covers as much of reinforcement learning as possible without going beyond the tabular case for which exact solutions can be found. Many algorithms presented in this part are new to the second edition, including UCB, Expected Sarsa, and Double Learning. Part II extends these ideas to function approximation, with new sections on such topics as artificial neural networks and the Fourier basis, and offers expanded treatment of off-policy learning and policy-gradient methods. Part III has new chapters on reinforcement learning's relationships to psychology and neuroscience, as well as an updated case-studies chapter including AlphaGo and AlphaGo Zero, Atari game playing, and IBM Watson's wagering strategy. The final chapter discusses the future societal impacts of reinforcement learning.

A novel on a man who has a phantom double. He is Kevin Grierson, a bookseller in New York whose shadow takes over his body, sometimes getting Grierson in trouble, other times saving him from trouble.

“Groundbreaking in its call to reconsider our approach to the slow rhythm of time in the very concrete realms of environmental health and social justice.” —Wold Literature Today The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of "slow violence" to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode. In a book of extraordinary scope, Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.