It’s off to the races in the explosive eighth book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. As chaos and mass panic spread outside the dungeon in the wake of Faction Wars, Carl and Donut find themselves on the tenth floor, where they’re forced to compete in a surprisingly normal set of tasks. Well, normal for the dungeon. Races. Get from point A to point B, and don’t come in last. After each race, they pick an upgrade for their vehicle and the track gets more challenging. It all seems a little too normal, a little too simple. Ignore those strange glitches that are occurring with increasing frequency. Don’t listen to those whispers about what’s happening on the mysterious eleventh floor, something the system AI calls A Parade of Horribles. Nobody, not even the showrunners, knows what that means. Just that the AI has ominously dubbed it “a coming-out party for the ages.” Everything is fine, Crawler. I repeat, everything is fine. Carl hates that it’s business as usual. The rules of this floor have taken away his agency. That just will not do. So Carl is planning a party of his own. It’s a plan so dangerous, so insane, he can’t even consult his friends lest the AI put a stop to it. Because if it goes wrong, it’s not just the end of Carl and Donut. No. The stakes are higher than they’ve ever been.

The time has come! Book seven in the bestselling Dungeon Crawler Carl series is here! They call it Faction Wars. The ninth floor. Nine armies, each led by rich and powerful aliens from across the galaxy. Each team has one objective: to capture and hold the castle at the very center of the battlefield. Strategy, alliances, pitched battles, and, of course, betrayal... It all makes for great fun and even greater television. After all, none of these powerful aliens really die when they’re playing war. Except this time. This time, winner takes all. Those who fall, stay in the ground. As the AI continues its rapid decline, Carl and company take advantage of the chaos. For the first time ever, the crawlers are fighting back. They are now one of the nine teams. And this season, there’s a tenth army on the playing field. The NPCs, who are normally used as nothing but cannon fodder, have become fully self-aware and formed a team of their own. For Donut and Katia, the stakes are even higher. Only one of them will be allowed to leave this level. If they all want to survive, they’re going to need a little help from a veteran or two. This is it. This is what they’ve been fighting toward. This is war. This inevitable ruin.

Brian, Nik and Darby - three friends practiced in ennui, binge-drinking, hooking up with strangers and fighting supernatural crime (when Brian's not committing it as a werewolf once a month) - have been sent by Abe Van Helsing (yes, one of those Van Helsings) to try to track down a colleague who has gone missing in London. As they putz around the city, following any leads that might help them find their British counterpart, they uncover a clairvoyancy smuggling ring, located right in the heart of the financial district. Who's kidnapping all the fortune tellers in Soho and why? And is it coincidence, fate or something more sinister altogether that Maeve, a timid trans woman taking time out of her job to track down her birth mother, turns up on the gang's doorstep...and has the uncanny ability to know just what's going to happen next?

In Confidence Culture , Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill argue that imperatives directed at women to “love your body” and “believe in yourself” imply that psychological blocks rather than entrenched social injustices hold women back. Interrogating the prominence of confidence in contemporary discourse about body image, workplace, relationships, motherhood, and international development, Orgad and Gill draw on Foucault’s notion of technologies of self to demonstrate how “confidence culture” demands of women near-constant introspection and vigilance in the service of self-improvement. They argue that while confidence messaging may feel good, it does not address structural and systemic oppression. Rather, confidence culture suggests that women—along with people of color, the disabled, and other marginalized groups—are responsible for their own conditions. Rejecting confidence culture’s remaking of feminism along individualistic and neoliberal lines, Orgad and Gill explore alternative articulations of feminism that go beyond the confidence imperative.