Do you believe in the Golden Rule ? or Do you think it only works for Donkeys? Can a donkey,born the color of the sun, live up to the name - Golden Rule ? Given the difficult job of protecting the farm's animals fromwolves,mountain lions, and wild dogs - Golden Rule finds his own version of the Ancient Golden Law and the 5 Secret Guiding Keys.Do you believe in the Golden Rule ? Do you think its just for donkeys ? Golden Rule- "Beginnings is the story of the birth and growth of a boy donkey whose golden color inspired his name. His namebecomes a great challenge as he tries to understand how he can live The Golden Rule- and honor his name. He learns to facedanger with honor, as he protects the farm's animals. Given the difficult job of protecting the other animals from wolves, mountainlions and wild dogs Golden Rule discovers his own version of the Ancient Golden Law and the 5 Secret Guiding Keys.

Stars our fearless President – Barack Obama, who awakens to discover he has been given a new crusade, a crusade to to bring ‘new’ hope and ‘new’ change to a hereto unknown group of liberal primitives…in a 5th, or 6th Dimension. Marvel in the exploits of the former president as he bashes in skulls, bites off ears and slashes his way through jungles with his oversized ladies driver...It all begins in a contemporary setting, a political retreat on the remote Cumberland Island in southeast Georgia. The president and the presidential candidate, find themselves lost and alone together, during a year when the planets are aligned in a rare 'Cosmic Singularity'...within the newly relabeled Bermuda Quadrangle. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, the two are whisked away unharmed by a tornado, to another place, to another dimension, to another existence where primitive cultures live. BamaOay is recognized by one faction of primitives as their leader. His mission: to unite and defeat the demons he calls "The Tea Baggers."Warning: This novel will be too provocative for most overly sensitive, PC-embracing readers. If you happen to be part of a PC police squad for your neighborhood, I would suggest you stop here, and move on...

A cross between Treasure Island, The Railway Children and Deliverance, The Black Joke is by turns exciting, amusing, charming, alarming, winsome, violent and strange - a rollicking read for adults with a childish love of adventure, and for children who aren't afraid of a few long words."Far off at the western edge of the world, where the green land meets the grey ocean and the wind never falters, Bodrach Nuwl, the Old Man of the Mist, rises a thousand feet above the sea. At his head the wind perpetually thunders, whipping the thin grasses and stunting the trees that lean and cling grimly with their ancient roots. He is so gigantic that each ledge and crinkle in his face is a little world in itself. On green, wind-blasted lawns the size of football pitches, whole populations of rabbits and foxes lead their lives perched in the air with no inkling of the outside world. Small crevices become great chasms, lined with trees growing from the rock itself, fed by ferny waterfalls and inhabited by finches and great dragonflies. Habitats here have no connection with the world at large. There are species of insect that exist nowhere else, and unknown pale orchids that thrive in cracks and crannies. Great caves loom open that from the sea must seem like the holes of sand-martins but in reality could swallow a small village and are inhabited by bats and blind snakes.Behind the cliffs huddles a dismal little town. In the town is a church, and in the church are some pews. And under one of the pews is a boy, hiding from the Vicar."Thus begins The Black Joke, which has been described as a cross between Treasure Island, The Railway Children and Deliverance. It is by turns exciting, amusing, charming, alarming, winsome, violent and strange - a rollicking read for adults with a childish love of adventure, and for children who aren't afraid of a few long words.There's a skeleton in the tunnel, a pair of loathsome bullies in the classroom, a mysterious ship in the harbour and vague rumours about missing treasure. But ... pirates? Oh, come on, surely not. That would be ridiculous. You don't get pirates any more ... do you?You will meet ...... the fearsome Urethra Grubb, the worst woman in the world ...... the emphatic Rosella Prettyfoot, who wears big boots and knows how to use them ...... the sinister Trinity Teague, who disappeared and has now come back ...... the odorous Billy Moon, and his mother Primrose who's no better than she should be ...... and the slightly bewildered Pertinacious Potts and his annoying sister Fenestra, who have to make sense of it all and know that no good will come of it. Probably.

A group of poems based on the last several years of the author's life. A mixture of dark and humorous poems.A grim yet stirring tale of a family defending their lonely homestead against savage sea raiders; and of the complex love that exists between the hulking, violent but dull-witted Headho and his wife, the strong-willed and fiery Elfswitha. It is a violent tale leavened with a little humour and softer moments of calm amidst the struggle.When the wild Fynn come raiding, Headho refuses to abandon his stead, resolving to resist them with violence. His family stand by him and their bravery may allow him to stave off the raiders until help arrives.Blood-swan Songs are a series of stand-alone tales of the wild northern Saes, and include appearances from some of the characters found in the fantasy series, A Road of Blood and Slaughter, also available on Smashwords.

“Nano Stories from Hilbert Space” are very short stories set in the whimsical world of Hilbert Space."Fully Automated" is the tale of a race of aliens, who face a unique challenge on their way to a free civilization. Their fate serves as a warning, that in a world, dominated by economy, capitalism and money, automation can be seen as an extinction event.“Nano Stories from Hilbert Space” are very short stories (no longer than 4000 words each) set in the whimsical world of Hilbert Space. Hilbert Space, a very special region of the universe, is a rather unique place. Inhabited by dozens of space faring civilizations and spanning hundreds of systems, it is home to thousands of stories worth telling. While the laws of physics, which lead to the rest of space being quite dull and boring for the most part, are acknowledged here, Hilbert Space is known to find many workarounds, loopholes, and compromises that ensure that it is a dangerous, yet also extremely entertaining domain. "Fully Automated" is the tale of the Parokk, an alien race that lives peacefully and happily on their planet Parogia. But then something terrible happens: Due to technological progress the Parokk can have everything they wish for, wihtout the need to work. While other races simply accept their fate and live as a free society of scientists, artists and philosophers, the Parokk choose to fight. They fight for their right to do manual labour, their right to serve the Corporation and ultimately their right to earn barely enough to survive.

Will’s weekend retreat at his lake cottage was interrupted by an issue from work. His intent on remedying the situation was complicated by connection and power issues. Were the problems due to the remote location or was some unknown spirit with him in the cottage?The Death Drink has been reopened, Kalihan along with his friends have started creating havoc again. Acura now tries to persuade his celestial father Sonste to fight this war again. But his father gives him the idea of using the Panacea so as to resurrect the soldiers of yore. Brahm and Ugra the sons of Idaha undergo fast cell multiplication using a mixture of Soma and Panacea and become huge demi-gods. Acura along with the demi-gods excavate a very old palace near Salt Sea. Can they save the earth before it is too late? Find out by reading the second edition of Tribes of Chonohaush.

Detective Lindsay Boxer has everything she could possibly want. Her marriage and baby daughter are perfect, and life in Homicide in the San Francisco Police Department is going well. But all that could change in an instant. Lindsay is called to a crime scene at the Four Seasons Hotel. There is a dead man in one of the rooms, shot at close range. The man checked in under a false name with no ID on him, so the first puzzle will be finding out who he is. In the room next door are a dead young man and woman, also shot. They are surrounded by high-tech surveillance equipment. Could they have been spying on the man now dead in the room next to them? And in the utilities cupboard down the hall is the dead body of a house maid. The murders are all clearly linked and professionally executed. But what is the motive behind it all? Lindsay will need to risk everything she has to find out.

As the successful and driven CEO of Lewis Sporting Goods, Dillon rarely has time to eat a home cooked meal, let alone put any time or effort into maintaining an actual relationship. He's been living on fumes and casual encounters for so long that finding love and starting a family never even crossed his mind, until his cousins Gabe and Reardon found women who gave them both. Laurel has been in love with Dillon since she was nine years old. Unfortunately, he's always seen her as his little sister's pesky best friend. She can't stop her heart from beating frantically whenever he's near, but she's become an expert at keeping her feelings from everyone, especially Dillon. Her secret has been safe, until now... When Laurel needs help with her business plan, her best friend urges her to seek help from Dillon. Determined to push her feelings aside and focus on her fledgling business, Laurel knows she needs to do whatever it takes to succeed, even if it means being treated to indifference and big brother teasing from the man she loves. Can Laurel work with Dillon and still keep her heart intact, or will things get Too Distracting when Dillon realizes what a beautiful, kind, and generous woman she has become? Too Distracting is the third in an all-new small-town romance series by Bethany Lopez. Follow the Lewis cousins as they learn about love and loss in Cherry Springs, the kind of place where there are festivals for every occasion and everyone knows your business.

*Librarian's Note: This is an alternate-cover edition for /show/22929080-shadow-study"> ISBN 9780778317401 * Once, only her own life hung in the balance… When Yelena was a poison taster, her life was simpler. She survived to become a vital part of the balance of power between rival countries Ixia and Sitia. Now she uses her magic to keep the peace in both lands—and protect her relationship with Valek. Suddenly, though, dissent is rising. And Valek’s job—and his life—are in danger. As Yelena tries to uncover her enemies, she faces a new challenge: her magic is blocked.And now she must find a way to keep not only herself but all that she holds dear alive. A CHRONICLES OF IXIA NOVEL

It's been one year since all the adults disappeared. Gone. Despite the hunger and the lies, even despite the plague, the kids of Perdido Beach are determined to survive. Creeping into the tenuous new world they've built, though, is perhaps the worst incarnation yet of the enemy known as the Darkness: fear. Within the FAYZ, life breaks down while the Darkness takes over, literally—turning the dome-world of the FAYZ entirely black. In darkness, the worst fears of all emerge, and the cruelest of intentions are carried out. But even in their darkest moments, the inhabitants of the FAYZ maintain a will to survive and a desire to take care of the others in their ravaged band that endures, no matter what the cost. Fear, Michael Grant's fifth book in the bestselling dystopian Gone series, will thrill readers . . . even as it terrifies them.

Molded by a tragic childhood, nineteen-year-old Rogan finds it extremely difficult to trust people. Now Haydyn, her best friend and the one person she does trust, is dying and only Rogan can save her. Setting off on a journey to retrieve the plant that will cure Haydyn and subsequently the ills that will befall them all if she dies, Rogan is stuck in close quarters with a protector she distrusts above all others. Wolfe Stovia. The son of the man who destroyed Rogan’s family. At a constant battle of wills with the handsome Captain of the Guard, Rogan just knows this adventure together will be fraught with tension. She never imagined, however, that the quest would be so dangerous… not least of all when she finds herself falling for a man she could have sworn was her no.1 enemy…

Celie and her friends and family are back in the Castle, safe and sound. But there's still the problem of Wizard Arkwright. What do you do with an evil wizard? Especially when he escapes from his cell, but doesn't leave the Castle! Now it's up to Celie, with the help of her wizard brother Bran and her griffins, to track down Arkwright and get rid of him for good!

Jonathan Franzen arrived late, and last, in a family of boys in Webster Groves, Missouri. The Discomfort Zone is his intimate memoir of his growth from a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person," through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions. It's also a portrait of a middle-class family weathering the turbulence of the 1970s, and a vivid personal history of the decades in which America turned away from its midcentury idealism and became a more polarized society. The story Franzen tells here draws on elements as varied as the explosive dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship in the 1970s, the effects of Kafka's fiction on his protracted quest to lose his virginity, the elaborate pranks that he and his friends orchestrated from the roof of his high school, his self-inflicted travails in selling his mother's house after her death, and the web of connections between his all-consuming marriage, the problem of global warming, and the life lessons to be learned in watching birds. These chapters of a Midwestern youth and a New York adulthood are warmed by the same combination of comic scrutiny and unqualified affection that characterize Franzen's fiction, but here the main character is the author himself. Sparkling, daring, arrestingly honest, The Discomfort Zone narrates the formation of a unique mind and heart in the crucible of an everyday American family.

They are sent to the world's hot spots-on covert missions fraught with danger. They are called on to perform at the peak of their physical and mental capabilities, primed for combat and surveillance, yet ready to pitch in with disaster relief operations. They are the Army's Special Forces Groups. Now follow Tom Clancy as he delves into the training and tools, missions and mindset of these elite operatives. Special Forces includes: The making of Special Forces personnel: recruitment and training A rare look at actual Special Forces Group deployment Exercises Tools of the trade: weapons, communications and sensor equipment, survival gear Roles and missions: a mini-novel illustrates a probable scenario of Special Forces intervention Exclusive photographs, illustrations and diagrams Plus: an interview with General Hugh Shelton, USA, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and the former Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Special Operations Command-USSOCOM)

Twenty-first century London: rich and poor, black and white, joyful and melancholy, boring and deviant—occasionally lethal. Somewhere in the northwest of the city stands the Caldwell housing estate, a relic of '70s urban planning. Leah, an administrator for the lottery, grew up there. So did her best friend, Natalie, now a barrister, and Felix, an MG car mechanic. Thirty years later these Caldwell kids and their partners live only a few streets apart, yet inhabit separate worlds. Until the day a desperate local woman comes to Leah's door seeking help—and forces Leah out of her isolation. But is Shar a stranger or a friend? Sincere or a fraud? A connection to the past or a threat to the future? From private dinner tables to public parks, at work and at play, in this delicate but devastating novel of encounters Zadie Smith's Londoners find themselves navigating an increasingly atomized society. For some the city remains a place of happy accidents and chance good...

They say Black Dow's killed more men than winter, and clawed his way to the throne of the North up a hill of skulls. The King of the Union, ever a jealous neighbor, is not about to stand smiling by while he claws his way any higher. The orders have been given and the armies are toiling through the northern mud. Thousands of men are converging on a forgotten ring of stones, on a worthless hill, in an unimportant valley, and they've brought a lot of sharpened metal with them. THE HEROES For glory, for victory, for staying alive.

CLIVE BARKER'S FIRST TALES The book begins with "The Wood on the Hill", a short story about a bourgeois woman who is soon to learn a terrifying lesson concerning her complete disregard for anyone other than herself. The second tale, "The Candle in the Cloud", is a novella of dark fantasy which follows three children who discover a magical candle that transports them to a world where a plague-cloud is destroying everything in its wake. These two tales, the first ever written by Clive, are offered here for the very first time. Their production has been lovingly supervised by Clive himself to ensure that these are not mere books, but works of art to be cherished. Complete with original illustrations and appendices on select editions, First Tales is sure to delight everyone from longtime fans to new readers. In his own words: "These two stories represent the two essential structures of fantastique literature. ’The Wood on the Hill’ is about an incursion of unearthly elements into an approximation of our world. ’The Candle in the Cloud’ is about a journey taken by people from our world into another reality. Yin and Yang, if you like. Forces pulling in opposing directions but to achieve the same end: Revelation." Clive Barker (2013)

Eleven-year-old amateur detective and ardent chemist Flavia de Luce is used to digging up clues, whether they’re found among the potions in her laboratory or between the pages of her insufferable sisters’ diaries. What she is not accustomed to is digging up bodies. Upon the five-hundredth anniversary of St. Tancred’s death, the English hamlet of Bishop’s Lacey is busily preparing to open its patron saint’s tomb. Nobody is more excited to peek inside the crypt than Flavia, yet what she finds will halt the proceedings dead in their tracks: the body of Mr. Collicutt, the church organist, his face grotesquely and inexplicably masked. Who held a vendetta against Mr. Collicutt, and why would they hide him in such a sacred resting place? The irrepressible Flavia decides to find out. And what she unearths will prove there’s never such thing as an open-and-shut case.

Through a Faustian bargain, Edie Kramer has been pulled into the dangerous world of the Immortal Game, where belief makes your nightmares real. Hungry for sport, fears-made-flesh are always raising the stakes. To them, human lives are less than nothing, just pieces on a board. Because of her boyfriend Kian's sacrifice, she's operating under the mysterious Harbinger's aegis, but his patronage could prove as fatal as the opposition. Raw from deepest loss, she's terrified over the deal Kian made for her. Though her very public enemies keep sending foot soldiers - mercenary monsters committed to her destruction - she's not the one playing under a doom clock. Kian has six months . . . unless Edie can save him. And this is a game she can't bear to lose.

Investigator Arkady Renko, the pariah of the Moscow prosecutor’s office, has been assigned the thankless job of investigating a new phenomenon: late-night subway riders report seeing the ghost of Joseph Stalin on the platform of the Chistye Prudy Metro station. The illusion seems part political hocus-pocus and also part wishful thinking, for among many Russians Stalin is again popular; the bloody dictator can boast a two-to-one approval rating. Decidedly better than that of Renko, whose lover, Eva, has left him for Detective Nikolai Isakov, a charismatic veteran of the civil war in Chechnya, a hero of the far right and, Renko suspects, a killer for hire. The cases entwine, and Renko’s quests become a personal inquiry fueled by jealousy. The investigation leads to the fields of Tver outside of Moscow, where once a million soldiers fought. There, amidst the detritus, Renko must confront the ghost of his own father, a favorite general of Stalin’s. In these barren fields, patriots and shady entrepreneurs—the Red Diggers and Black Diggers—collect the bones, weapons and personal effects of slain World War II soldiers, and find that even among the dead there are surprises. Stalin’s Ghost is replete with Martin Cruz Smith’s trademark wit, dark humor and action. In this tale of Arkady Renko, Smith has again fashioned an unforgettable character as cynical as Philip Marlowe, but with the heart of a Chekhovian Everyman. The reader is treated to an unparalleled thriller woven with a depth of humanity found in the finest literature.

In his new work, Michel Houellebecq combines erotic provocation with a terrifying vision of a world teetering between satiety and fanaticism, to create one of the most shocking, hypnotic, and intelligent novels in years. In his early forties, Michel Renault skims through his days with as little human contact as possible. But following his father’s death he takes a group holiday to Thailand where he meets a travel agent—the shyly compelling Valérie—who begins to bring this half-dead man to life with sex of escalating intensity and audacity. Arcing with dreamlike swiftness from Paris to Pattaya Beach and from sex clubs to a terrorist massacre, Platform is a brilliant, apocalyptic masterpiece by a man who is widely regarded as one of the world’s most original and daring writers.