The year is 1348. Thomas, a disgraced knight, has found a young girl alone in a dead Norman village. An orphan of the Black Death, and an almost unnerving picture of innocence, she tells Thomas that plague is only part of a larger cataclysm—that the fallen angels under Lucifer are rising in a second war on heaven, and that the world of men has fallen behind the lines of conflict. Is it delirium or is it faith? She believes she has seen the angels of God. She believes the righteous dead speak to her in dreams. And now she has convinced the faithless Thomas to shepherd her across a depraved landscape to Avignon. There, she tells Thomas, she will fulfill her mission to confront the evil that has devastated the earth, and to restore to this betrayed, murderous knight the nobility and hope of salvation he long abandoned. As hell unleashes its wrath, and as the true nature of the girl is revealed, Thomas will find himself on a macabre battleground of angels and demons, saints, and the risen dead, and in the midst of a desperate struggle for nothing less than the soul of man.

A thrilling book about the abounding queerness of the natural world that challenges our expectations of what is normal, beautiful, and possible.Growing up, Patricia Kaishian felt most at home in the swamps and culverts near her house in the Hudson Valley. A child who frequently felt out of place, too much of one thing or not enough of another, she found acceptance in these settings, among other amphibious beings. In snakes, snails, and, above all, fungi, she saw her own developing identities as a queer, neurodivergent person reflected back at her—and in them, too, she found a personal path to a life of science.In Forest Euphoria, Kaishian shows us this making of a scientist and introduces readers to the queerness, literal and otherwise, of all the life around us. Fungi, we learn, commonly have more than two biological sexes—and some as many as twenty-three thousand. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate “love darts” at each other during courtship. Glass eels are sexually undetermined until their last year of life, which stumped scientists once dubbed “the eel question.” Nature, Kaishian shows us, is filled with the unusual, the overlooked, and the marginalized—and they have lessons for us all.Wide-ranging, richly observant, and full of surprise, Forest Euphoria will open your eyes and change how you look at the world around you.

We find our way forward by going back. The invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec says, but we can still honor the bonds between us. Settlers dominated and divided, but Indigenous peoples won't just send them all "home." Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps readers see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer. Settler colonialism tried to force us into one particular way of living, but the old ways of kinship can help us imagine a different future. Krawec asks, What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the land, to one another, and to Indigenous movements for solidarity? Braiding together historical, scientific, and cultural analysis, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the vivid threads of communal memory, Krawec crafts a stunning, forceful call to "unforget" our history. This remarkable sojourn through Native and settler history, myth, identity, and spirituality helps us retrace our steps and pick up what was lost along the chances to honor rather than violate treaties, to see the land as a relative rather than a resource, and to unravel the history we have been taught.

Leaving the Terran Empire's POW camp, they thought they found their way home. Home, however, is taking a different route than these cyborgs expect. Most Wanted Alien Brides Book 1 Intergalactic Dating Agency When the Intergalactic Dating Agency mistakes a prison ship for their new clients looking for mates, cyborg Kolvin jumps at the opportunity. A new life, with the bonus of a ready-made wife? How can this go badly? But when Kolvin meets his mate, she winds up not being what he expects. She drives him crazy. She's not even from his dimension. His Craving, however, wants what it wants, and he finds himself at the mercy of it. Tina Craige, an astronomer from Earth, is pretty sure she's dead. After all, one does not walk through an excavated arch and wind up in another dimension. Especially not in one where a giant cyborg humanoid wants her as a mate. When she discovers that he's traumatized from being held prisoner of war, she can't bring herself to abandon him. Not yet. She has thirty days to accept this giant cyborg as her mate, PTSD and all, or return to her dimension and Earth, as if she'd never left. And never see, or remember, him again. Will she be able to give up everything for her cyborg mate?

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.As indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution insures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.” As Elizabeth Gilbert writes, Robin Wall Kimmerer is “a great teacher, and her words are a hymn of love to the world.” The Serviceberry is an antidote to the broken relationships and misguided goals of our times, and a reminder that “hoarding won’t save us, all flourishing is mutual.”

This illustrated volume contains every published story by the Brothers Grimm, from well-known classics like "Cinderella" to lesser-known tales such as "The Bright Sun Brings on the Day". Other enchanting fairy tales • "The Frog Prince" • "Hansel and Gretel" • "Snow-White and Red-Rose" • "Rapunzel" • "Little Red Riding Hood" • "Rumpelstiltskin"

Come along, Toto, she said. We will go to the Emerald City and ask the Great Oz how to get back to Kansas again. Swept away from her home in Kansas by a tornado, Dorothy and her dog Toto find themselves stranded in the fantastical Land of Oz. As instructed by the Good Witch of the North and the Munchkins, Dorothy sets off on the yellow brick road to try and find her way to the Emerald City and the Wizard of Oz, who can help her get home. With her companions the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion, Dorothy experiences an adventure full of friendship, magic and danger. A much-loved children's classic, The Wizard of Oz continues to delight readers young and old with its enchanting tale of witches, flying monkeys and silver shoes.

A grumpy alien cowboy, a pregnant human woman, and the power of finding family in the most unexpected of places…When I lose my home and my horse all in the same afternoon, I’m forced to take painful stock of my situation. I’m twenty-three years old. Single. And pregnant. I’ve always been the glass-half-full sort of gal, but things are looking truly dire as I stare down my rapidly approaching due date.That’s when I hear about Zabria Prinar One. A ranching outpost planet where a bunch of lonely alien cowboys are waiting for brides. I grew up on a ranch – surely I have enough to offer that one of them will want me. Even if my own family doesn’t.So I book a shuttle and go.But my pilot abandons me in a random field, leaving me to face down the intimidating elements alone.Including one very angry alien bull about to charge.Just before I get gored, a powerful rider with white eyes comes thundering out of the darkness to save me.His name is Zohro. He’s beautiful and pink – the colour of all my favourite things.He is also possibly the grumpiest and most impatient male I have ever met.But I don’t care. There’s a protective streak in him that makes me feel so safe, no matter how fierce his frowns are. Within moments of meeting him, I know that he’s the one I want to marry.I just have to tell him that I’m pregnant with another man’s child first…