What can you do when the thing you hate most in the world is also the only thing which might keep you alive? Ryan Blackwell never wanted to have magical abilities. He'd rather leave them as far behind him as possible - and never look back! Arriving at the military college of Northshield University was supposed to be a chance to start over and build a new life for himself. One without magic, thank you very much! But Northshield holds a secret: a powerful nexus of ley lines. Where these converging lines of raw magical force intersect, strange things can happen and even stranger beings are attracted to the site. Almost overnight Ryan is faced with a choice: accept his magic or die. But even that may not be enough, because as the threats grow stronger and students begin dying, even Ryan will find his power tested to the limit. Giving up isn't an option, and flight is impossible. That only leaves one path to survival...fight back! ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kevin McLaughlin is the multiple USA Today bestselling author of over a hundred works of science fiction and fantasy. He writes smart, fun adventures; the sort that keep you reading WAY past bedtime and leave you with no regrets the next day. He brings together a background of military, scientific, medical, and martial arts experience to create stories with vibrant characters which have thrilled millions of readers.

Opwonya Innocent was born three years after unrest started in northern Uganda and three years before the formation of the anti-government Lord's Resistance Army led by Joseph Kony. Death came to his village when he was only seven, and soon his parents required him to sleep miles away from home for safety. At ten he was abducted by Kony's army and taken to a training camp for child soldiers, where brutality and violence became his new reality. After a narrow escape he was taken by government soldiers to a counseling center before returning to his family, now without the guidance of a father. Since that time, Innocent has exhibited extraordinary resilience, pushing through these and many other challenges, ultimately securing a position which has allowed him to come to the aid of countless children in Uganda facing much of the same hardship. The book reveals, in his own words, Innocent's struggle to heal from the trauma he experienced, a growing awareness of a desire to help others and his tireless effort to realize meaningful, positive change. Innocent's inspiring story embodies the triumph of hope and determination over pain, trauma and fear.

This book argues that the theory of force elaborated in Immanuel Kant's aesthetics (and in particular, his theorization of the dynamic sublime) is of decisive importance to poetry in the nineteenth century and to the connection between poetry and philosophy over the last two centuries. Inspired by his deep engagement with the critical theory of Walter Benjamin, who especially developed this Kantian strain of thinking, Kevin McLaughlin uses this theory of force to illuminate the work of three of the most influential nineteenth-century writers in their respective national traditions: Friedrich Hölderlin, Charles Baudelaire, and Matthew Arnold. The result is a fine elucidation of Kantian theory and a fresh account of poetic language and its aesthetic, ethical, and political possibilities.

The Philology of Life retraces the outlines of the philological project developed by Walter Benjamin in his early essays on Hölderlin, the Romantics, and Goethe. This philological program, McLaughlin shows, provides the methodological key to Benjamin’s work as a whole. According to Benjamin, German literary history in the period roughly following the first World War was part of a wider “crisis of historical experience”—a life crisis to which Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) had instructively but insufficiently responded. Benjamin’s literary critical struggle during these years consisted in developing a philology of literary historical experience and of life that is rooted in an encounter with a written image. The fundamental importance of this “philological” method in Benjamin’s work seems not to have been recognized by his contemporary readers, including Theodor Adorno who considered the approach to be lacking in dialectical rigor. This facet of Benjamin’s work was also elided in the postwar publications of his writings, both in German and English. In recent decades, the publication of a wider range of Benjamin’s writings has made it possible to retrace the outlines of a distinctive philological project that starts to develop in his early literary criticism and that extends into the late studies of Baudelaire and Paris. By bringing this innovative method to light this study proposes “the philology of life” as the key to the critical program of one of the most influential intellectual figures in the humanities.

Writing in the Time We HaveWe all have twenty four hours in a day, 365 days in a year. And in theory, how we spend that time is entirely up to us. In practice? Not so much! I bet you find that most of those hours are filled in for you. We have childcare, and work, and food prep, and bill paying, and housework, and yard work, and myriad other tasks that eat up bits and bites of that precious time, until there is very little left. And so most would-be novelists never write their books, because they “don’t have time”. They simply cannot figure out how to add anything else in. Many of us have trouble finding the time to brush our teeth more than once a day - fitting in a novel, too? It looks too big. Looms too large. It’s a mountain of a task, and there seems to be no way to confront something that will chew up that many hours in the small bits of time we have available. In this book we'll address that lack of time, and we’re also going to look at the novel as a set of smaller bites. By the time you are done, you will have all the tools you need to finish your novel - to fit that important work into your already busy life. Are you tired of not having the time to accomplish your dream of writing a novel? Have you written a book before, but it took forever, and you don't know how you'll ever finish the next one? This book is for you.

Secret agent Splat armed with his spy kit sets out to solve a mystery.

Proposing a new interpretation of literature and mass culture in nineteenth-century Europe, this work focuses on works by Marx, Balzac, Dickens, Adorno, and Benjamin to explore in them a complex "mimetic" disposition toward commodification in the realm of culture. The aim of the book is twofold: to explicate in the work of Balzac and Dickens subtle and profoundly ambivalent attitudes toward the rapidly expanding mass culture of the 1830's in France and England, and to identify through this reading of the novelists a common mimetic element that has eluded a certain dialectical approach to art's overcoming of mass culture - an approach best exemplified in Horkheimer and Adorno's influential essay on the "culture industry."

"The Paper Age" is the phrase coined by Thomas Carlyle in 1837 to describe the monetary and literary inflation of the French Revolution—an age of mass-produced "Bank-paper" and "Book-paper." Carlyle's phrase is suggestive because it points to the particular substance—paper—that provides the basis for reflection on the mass media in much popular fiction appearing around the time of his historical essay. Rather than becoming a metaphor, however, paper in some of this fiction seems to display the more complex and elusive character of what Walter Benjamin evocatively calls "the decline of the aura." The critical perspective elaborated by Benjamin serves as the point of departure for the readings of paper proposed in Paperwork. Kevin McLaughlin argues for a literary-critical approach to the impact of the mass media on literature through a series of detailed interpretations of paper in fiction by Poe, Stevenson, Melville, Dickens, and Hardy. In this fiction, he argues, paper dramatizes the "withdrawal," as Benjamin puts it, of the "here and now" of the traditional work of art into the dispersing or distracting movement of the mass media. Paperwork seeks to challenge traditional concepts of medium and message that continue to inform studies of print culture and the mass media especially in the wake of industrialized production in the early nineteenth century. It breaks new ground in the exploration of the difference between mass culture and literature and will appeal to cultural historians and literary critics alike.

While Charlie, a sleepy basset hound, tells about the busy life of a ranch dog, his best friend Suzie, a Jack Russell terrier, is getting the work done.

Count to 10, but not with monkeys!