A twisted, tangled story about workplace love-affairs, and plants with a taste for human flesh During a grocery run to her local shopping center, Shell Pine sees a ‘HELP NEEDED’ sign in a flower shop window. She’s just left her fiancé, lost her job, and moved home to her parents’ house. She has to make a change and bring some good into her life, so she goes inside and takes a chance. Shell realizes right away that flowers are just the good thing she's been looking for, as is Neve, the beautiful florist who wrote the sign asking for help. The thing is, Neve needs help more than Shell could possibly imagine. An orchid growing out of sight in the heart of the mall is watching them closely. His name is Baby, and the beautiful florist belongs to him. He’s young, he’s hungry, and he’ll do just about anything to make sure he can keep growing big and strong. Nothing he eats – nobody he eats – can satisfy him, except the thing he most desires. Neve. He adores her and wants to consume her, and will stop at nothing to eat the one he loves. This is a story about possession, and monstrosity, and working retail. It is about hunger and desire, and other terrible things that grow.

Journey with Dante into the bowels of the earth and the profoundest depths of the human soul. The Inferno, the first part of Dante's Divine Comedy, has captivated readers for over seven centuries. This modern translation in terza rima captures the true essence of the Italian poem. This edition also includes: Notes: A single page of commentary for each canto, providing enough context for the modern reader to follow Dante's historical references and literary allusions, without getting bogged down by excessive notes. An extended commentary can be found online, at no additional cost, on the book's companion website (Dante's Afterlife). Bibliography and Further Reading: A detailed list of relevant primary and secondary sources (including online and multimedia resources), with short descriptions of each. Glossary: Concise descriptions and phonetic pronunciation guides for every person and place in the book. For each time a person or place is mentioned in the text, a canto and line number is provided in the glossary. It's easy to look up someone you're unfamiliar with, and it's equally easy to see where Dante refers to them in the text (even if they're unnamed). Illustrations, Maps, and Diagrams: Over a dozen original images and diagrams created by the translator, including a map of medieval Florence, a map of Tuscany and northern Italy, maps of Dante's Hell, a zodiac showing the positions of the planets at the start of Dante's journey, a timeline and schematic of the journey, and more. Dante's Afterlife: For readers and students of Dante who want to explore beyond the confines of the book, J. Simon Harris has created a companion website called Dante's Afterlife (a QR code and url are found at the back of the book). Here, the translator will publish extended commentary on the poem, historical background (a history of the Guelphs and Ghibellines, and the life of Dante), unique images, brief essays, translations of Dante's lyric poems and those of his contemporaries, and more. The website will be added to continually, and it will always remain free of charge.

When Englishman Chris Broad landed in a rural village in northern Japan he wondered if he'd made a huge mistake. With no knowledge of the language and zero teaching experience, was he about to be the most quickly fired English teacher in Japan's history?Abroad in Japan charts a decade of living in a foreign land and the chaos and culture clash that came with it. Packed with hilarious and fascinating stories, this book seeks out to unravel one the world's most complex cultures.Spanning ten years and all forty-seven prefectures, Chris takes us from the lush rice fields of the countryside to the frenetic neon-lit streets of Tokyo. With blockbuster moments such as a terrifying North Korean missile incident, a mortifying experience at a love hotel and a week spent with Japan's biggest movie star, Abroad in Japan is an extraordinary and informative journey through the Land of the Rising Sun.

All I wanted to do was live my life in peace. Maybe get a cat, expand my spice farm. Really anything that doesn't involve going on a quest where an orc might rip my face off. But they say the Goddess has favourites. If so, I'm clearly not one of them. After saving the demon Fallon in a wine-drunk stupor, all he wanted to do was kill an evil witch enslaving his people. I mean, I get it, don't get me wrong. But he's dragging me along for the ride, and I'm kind of peeved about it. On the bright side, he keeps burning off his shirt.

Philip K. Dick meets the Coen Brothers in this genre-bending near-future tech nightmare that is as bitingly funny as it is horrifically believable from the New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie. Meet Julia Flang, a twenty-something former semi-professional gamer, living with her retired uncle, and working two jobs she doesn’t like. Out of the blue, her estranged mother, a CFO for one of the world’s largest tech companies, offers her a temp job with a payday Julia can’t refuse. One sham interview later, she’s offered the to chaperone a man in a vegetative state—one with proprietary AI implanted in his head—from California to the East Coast. To sum up in Julia’s own “You want me to remote control this dead dude across the country.” In a word, yes. But he’s not dead dead. Meet a middle-aged man who wakes within a disorienting hellscape filled with monstrous grotesqueries. Worse than the fluid, morphing reality in which he’s trapped, he has no memory of who he is. He certainly doesn’t remember getting the rabbit tattoo on his arm. He only knows that he must find a certain person. Who? He can’t remember. Using a cell phone modeled after a video game controller, Julia fumblingly navigates the man she calls “Bernie” from the company campus and onto planes and through one of the largest airports in America. All the while, the man endures an ever-changing and worsening nightmare that offers clues as to who he was—and who he must track down. And as their two lives intertwine, Julia and Bernie become unlikely allies and fugitives on a collision course with reality. Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep is a heady, horrific genre-bender from one of the most groundbreaking voices in fiction today.

All I wanted to do was live my life in peace. Maybe get a cat, expand my spice farm. Really anything that doesn't involve going on a quest where an orc might rip my face off. But they say the Goddess has favourites. If so, I'm clearly not one of them. After saving the demon Fallon in a wine-drunk stupor, all he wanted to do was kill an evil witch enslaving his people. I mean, I get it, don't get me wrong. But he's dragging me along for the ride, and I'm kind of peeved about it. On the bright side, he keeps burning off his shirt.

A TALE FOR EVERYONE WHO’S EVER FALLEN FOR THE VILLAIN… When her whole life collapsed, Rae still had books. Dying, she seizes a second chance at living: a magical bargain that lets her enter the world of her favourite fantasy series. She wakes in a castle on the edge of a hellish chasm, in a kingdom on the brink of war. Home to dangerous monsters, scheming courtiers and her favourite fictional character: the Once and Forever Emperor. He’s impossibly alluring, as only fiction can be. And in this fantasy world, she discovers she's not the heroine, but the villainess in the Emperor's tale. So be it. The wicked are better dressed, with better one-liners, even if they're doomed to bad ends. She assembles the wildly disparate villains of the story under her evil leadership, plotting to change their fate. But as the body count rises and the Emperor's fury increases, it seems Rae and her allies may not survive to see the final page. This adult epic fantasy debut from Sarah Rees Brennan puts the reader in the villain's shoes, for an adventure that is both 'brilliant' (Holly Black) and 'supremely satisfying' (Leigh Bardugo). Expect a rogue's gallery of villains including an axe wielding maid, a shining knight with dark moods, a homicidal bodyguard, and a playboy spymaster with a golden heart and a filthy reputation.