Harry Potter meets The Terminator in this action-packed adventure about a young man who discovers that everything he believed about his world is a lie. The year is 2120. The humans are dead. The mages have retreated from the world after a madman blew up civilization with weaponized magical technology. Safe within domes that protect them from the nuclear wasteland on the other side, the mages have spent the last century putting their lives back together. Nikolai is obsessed with…

Have you ever had a dream that felt so real, you thought it was actually happening? You might not even be sure you’re asleep, dreaming, in your bed, it feels so authentic. If this happens repeatedly, due to a traumatic event or a change of medication, could one eventually become a bit confused about what is real and what is a dream? In “Smoking In Bed,” an adventurous, comedic, and occasionally tragic tale of life in the Big City, Phil…

Tender, honest and irresistibly compelling, First Comes Marriage is the first Muslim-American memoir dedicated to the themes of love and sexuality. Huda and Hadi's story brilliantly circles around a series of firsts, chronicling two virgins moving through their first everything: first hand holding, first kiss, and first sexual encounter. First Comes Marriage is an almost unbearably humanizing tale that tucks into our hearts and lingers in our imagination, while also challenging long-standing taboos within the Muslim community and the romantic…

Brian Posehn is a successful and instantly recognizable comedian, actor, and writer. He also happens to be a giant nerd. That's partly because he's been obsessed with such things as Dungeons & Dragons, comic books, and heavy metal since he was a child; the other part is because he fills out every bit of his 6'7'' frame. Brian's always felt awkward and like a perpetual outsider, but he found his way through the difficulties of growing up by escaping into…

On a freezing night in January 1941, a little Jewish girl is found on the steps of an apartment building in Bucharest. With Romania recently allied with the Nazis, the Jewish population is in grave danger, undergoing increasingly violent persecution. The girl is placed in an orphanage and eventually adopted by a wealthy childless couple who name her Natalia. As she assimilates into her new life, she all but forgets the parents who were forced to leave her behind. They…

A boy makes a series of bad decisions after his father bans him from reading books. A Jewish family is forever changed when a boy with a Neo-Nazi background is thrust into their lives. A man’s epic downfall is narrated through a beer ad. An arthritic grandmother hopes to serve justice to an untouchable, evil sheriff. A heavy-metal rocker’s life takes a radical turn during the 1992 LA riots. These are a few stories in Bloodshot And Bruised, a blistering…

In Berlin, Germany, in the early 1930s, the acclaimed Swiss film director Emil Nägeli receives the assignment of a lifetime: travel to Japan and make a film to establish the dominance of Adolf Hitler's Nazi empire once and for all. But his handlers are unaware that Nägeli has colluded with the Jewish film critics to pursue an alternative objective--to create a monumental, modernist, allegorical spectacle to warn the world of the horror to come. Meanwhile, in Japan, the film minister…

Don Geary, a single father and freelance graphic designer, barely manages to make ends meet as he works the margins of the churning creative economy in Portland, Oregon, during the Obama administration. Talented but solitary, sensitive but critical, Geary tries to make it through a season in which he monitors the rise of social media and local “thought leaders” from an increasingly desperate position. In scenes of humor, anxiety, tenderness, and desire, Gielgud chronicles men and women who, in a…

Cy Twombly was a man obsessed with myth and history--including his own. Shuttling between stunning homes in Italy and the United States where he perfected his room-size canvases, he managed his public image carefully and rarely gave interviews. Upon first seeing Twombly's remarkable paintings, writer Joshua Rivkin became obsessed himself with the mysterious artist, and began chasing every lead, big or small--anything that might illuminate those works, or who Twombly really was. Now, after unprecedented archival research and years of…

Inspired by a brother's high school science project--a perpetual motion machine that could save the world-- The Perpetual Motion Machine is a memoir in essays that attempts to save a sibling by depicting the visceral pain that accompanies longing for some past impossibility. The collection has been a science project in its study of memory, in the calculation and plotting of the moments that make up a childhood. The preparation has been "in the field" in that it is built…

Kara Cooney discusses and signs When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt Female rulers are a rare phenomenon--but thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt, women reigned supreme. Regularly, repeatedly, and with impunity, queens like Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, and Cleopatra controlled the totalitarian state as power-brokers and rulers. But throughout human history, women in positions of power were more often used as political pawns in a male-dominated society. What was so special about ancient Egypt that provided women this…

Cassidy is a long-haired, Choose Your Own Adventure author and part-time bartender. In an attempt to escape the haunting memory of an abortion, he and his wife Phoenix, a once free-spirited, pot-smoking poet trapped in a job as copywriter for a public relations firm, leave Los Angeles and move to the East Coast. Phoenix can barely function. Cassidy drinks too much and takes refuge in long-distance phone calls with his friend Cliff, still living in Los Angeles. When Cassidy shares…