Chris is an average Joe who wakes up everyday and follows the same old routine...his work, his marriage, and his life becoming more and more stale and unexciting. His life drastically changes on February 26th, in ways that he would have never imagined. He crossed that imaginary line between sanity and insanity, life and death, losing all respect. Then, he experienced the bizarre, in every possible dark way. Accompany Chris on his wild twenty four hour ride into eternity...

When Cedric uses lies and deception to try to drive a wedge between the Guardians, the girls learn that true friendship cannot be broken.Will, Irma, Taranee, Cornelia and Hay Lin know all about illusions.Since they discovered their powers as Guardians of the Veil, they have kept their secret hidden.While the girls use deception only to protect people, Cedric uses lies to turn the girls against one another.It is not until Will's life is put in danger that the girls discover that the one thing that is not an illusion is true friendship.With full colour comic inserts at the start and end of the story.

Why do you believe what you believe? You’ve been lied to. Probably a lot. We’re always stunned when we realize we’ve been deceived. We can’t believe we were fooled: What was I thinking? How could I have believed that? We always wonder why we believed the lie. But have you ever wondered why you believe the truth? People tell you the truth all the time, and you believe them; and if, at some later point, you’re confronted with evidence that the story you believed was indeed true, you never wonder why you believed it in the first place. In this incisive and insightful taxonomy of lies and liars, New York Times bestselling author Aja Raden makes the surprising claim that maybe you should. Buttressed by history, psychology, and science, The Truth About Lies is both an eye-opening primer on con-artistry—from pyramid schemes to shell games, forgery to hoaxes—and also a telescopic view of society through the mechanics of belief: why we lie, why we believe, and how, if at all, the acts differ. Through wild tales of cons and marks, Raden examines not only how lies actually work, but also why they work, from the evolutionary function of deception to what it reveals about our own. In her previous book, Stoned, Raden asked, “What makes a thing valuable?” In The Truth About Lies, she asks “What makes a thing real?” With cutting wit and a deft touch, Raden untangles the relationship of truth to lie, belief to faith, and deception to propaganda. The Truth About Lies will change everything you thought you knew about what you know, and whether you ever really know it.

Diplomacy has never been Alex’s strong suit… When the vampire council puts Alex and James on trial for exposing the species’ existence to the world, Alex's freedom and James's life hang in the balance, though Alex suspects James’s new daywalking ability is the real aim of their inquisition. Any hope of talking their way out of hot water evaporates when one of the council members is found murdered…with James standing over the smoldering corpse. With every vampire looking to claim Alex’s power for themselves, she will have to team up with an unlikely ally, push her magic to its limits, and match wits against a powerful new foe if she hopes to come out unscathed. Praise for L. R. Braden: “Magic, Murder and Romance, oh my! This is an amazing fantasy in which every character is more than they appear.‗Winchester Public Library on A Drop of Magic “A riveting world filled with amazing characters and a tightly woven plot.‗Richelle Rodarte, Netgalley reviewer on Chaos Song “This is one of my favorite fictional worlds to visit. . . . I devoured this like a reader starved for every word, gulping yet somehow managing to savor the delightful taste of the story.‗Lucretia, Goodreads reviewer on Of Mettle & Magic About the Author: L.R. Braden is the bestselling author of the Magicsmith urban fantasy series, the spin-off Rifter Series (Book One Demon Riding Shotgun), and several works of short fiction. Her writing has won the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Sci-fi/Fantasy, the First Horizon Award for debut authors, the Imadjinn Award for Best Urban Fantasy, and the CAL Award in both the Fantasy and Paranormal categories. She was also honored to be a finalist for the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers 2021 Writer of the Year award. She and her family live in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies.

Chuck's personal website receives thousands of hits and he receives tremendous fan support from around-the-world. Though books and movies on rock groups abound, there are not yet any published books on either STYX or Chuck Panozzo. His is an illuminating story, written by Chuck (one of the two original founders of one of the longest lasting arena bands in the history of rock 'n' roll), and co-author and professional journalist, Michel Skettino. After 25 years of continual success in the music industry, STYX remains an enormously successful rock band, touring the world every year for the last fifteen, and winning new fans around-the-world with each successive appearance.; With four consecutive triple-platinum albums and 25 million in record sales, a natural market exists for this new book title, and with STYX' millions of fans worlwide, along with ongoing concerts being performed constantly in this country and abroad (attracting even greater audiences and younger fans), the telling of this story is both timely and is sure to speak to both gay audiences and adoring fans of rock and roll.

“The Knowledge Illusion is filled with insights on how we should deal with our individual ignorance and collective wisdom.” —Steven Pinker We all think we know more than we actually do. Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don’t even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. We’re constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our bodies, our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we interact—and usually we don’t even realize we’re doing it. The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic. We have mastered fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and sequenced our genome. And yet each of us is error prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant. The fundamentally communal nature of intelligence and knowledge explains why we often assume we know more than we really do, why political opinions and false beliefs are so hard to change, and why individual-oriented approaches to education and management frequently fail. But our collaborative minds also enable us to do amazing things. The Knowledge Illusion contends that true genius can be found in the ways we create intelligence using the community around us.

Saul Smilansky presents an original treatment of the problem of free will, which lies at the heart of morality and human self-understanding. He maintains that we have most of the resources we need for a proper understanding of the problem; and the key to it is the role played by illusion. The major traditional philosophical approaches are inadequate, Smilansky argues: their partial insights need to be integrated into a hybrid view, which he calls Fundamental Dualism. Common views about justice, responsibility, human worth, and related notions are radically misguided, and the absurd looms large. We do, however, find some justification for enlightened moral views, and grounding for some of our most cherished views of human nature. The bold and perhaps disturbing claim of Free Will and Illusion is that we could not live adequately with a complete awareness of the truth about human freedom: illusion lies at the centre of the human condition. The necessity of illusion is seen to follow from the basic elements of the free will issue, helping keep our moral and psychological worlds intact. Smilansky offers the challenge of recognizing the centrality of illusion and trying to free ourselves to some extent from it; this is not only a philosophical challenge, but a moral and psychological one as well.

The Vital Lie is the first book to examine the reality-illusion conflict in modern drama from Ibsen to present-day playwrights. The book questions why vital lies, lies necessary for life itself, are such an obsessive concern for playwrights of the last hundred years. Using the work of fifteen playwrights, Abbott seeks to discover if modern playwrights treat illusions as helpful or necessary to life, or as signals of sicknesses from which human beings need to be cured. What happens to characters when they are forced to face the truth about themselves and their worlds without the protection of their illusions? The author develops a three-part historical analysis of the use of the reality-illusion theme, from its origins as a metaphysical search to its current elaborations as a theatrical game.

Fifty years after the end of World War II Clive Ponting provides a major reassessment of the most destructive conflict in human history - one in which 85 million people died. Armageddon avoids conventional chronological accounts in order to concentrate on the deeper forces shaping the origins, course and outcome of the war across the globe. It analyses how and why the war spread from being a limited European conflict to the only global war, why countries were dragged into the fighting and how only a small number of neutral states escaped. It compares the two alliances, how they mobilized their resources and their strategies for victory. It avoids a detailed description of how commanders maneuvered on the battlefield and concentrates instead on the impact the war had on individual soldiers, sailors and airmen. Equally important is the fate of hundreds of millions of civilians. How did they survive occupation and what did resistance, collaboration and liberation really involve, and what happened at the end of the war? Armageddon has a truly global sweep, combined with an eye for detail, and provides fascinating comparisons from a multi-faceted war. It contains new facts, asks provocative questions and challenges many of the common assumptions about the war. It is a compelling new inquiry.

Pulitzer prize–winner Chris Hedges charts the dramatic and disturbing rise of a post-literate society that craves fantasy, ecstasy and illusion. Chris Hedges argues that we now live in two societies: One, the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world, that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other, a growing majority, is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. In this “other society,” serious film and theatre, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins. In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Hedges navigates this culture — attending WWF contests as well as Ivy League graduation ceremonies — exposing an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion.