Showing results by narrator "Eunice Wong" in All Categories

It's 1980s New York, and though the coke flows freely, money and glamour are the more powerful intoxicants. While fortunes are being made in SoHo galleries and on Wall Street, an underclass of transient drag queens and dandies, club kids and strippers, artists and actors, models and waitstaff wander the streets, providing the city's background color, cheap labor, and even cheaper entertainment.

See You At San Diego is the comprehensive chronicle of Comic-Con International and modern geekdom itself as told through countless stories by nearly fifty of the most integral members of the Comic-Con and fandom scene. This full-fledged oral history—bursting with intimate reflections, hilarious observations, and at times, heartbreaking stories—is about how the geek at last inherited the earth and the story of the transformation of mainstream American pop culture into comic book culture over the past century.

It’s 1968, London is in full swing, and the Savoy Hotel is at the height of its legendary glitz and glamour, welcoming the rich, famous, and aristocratic into its rarified world of perfection. Royals wait upstairs in luxurious suites for discreet encounters. All is as it should be at the Savoy. If only it weren’t for the dead body in Room 705. Could it be murder? Impossible! Who could have done such a thing? Suspicion falls upon Priscilla Tempest, the quick-witted Canadian head of the Savoy press office who has a penchant for champagne, the wrong sort of men—and trouble.

Sociologist Felicia Wu Song has spent years considering the personal and collective dynamics of living in digital ecosystems. In this book she combines psychological, neurological, and sociological insights with theological reflection to explore two major questions: What kind of people are we becoming with personal technologies in hand? And who do we really want to be? Song unpacks the soft tyranny of the digital age, including the values embedded in our apps and the economic systems that drive our habits and their subtle yet pervasive effects.

Welcome to a very special issue of Weird Tales. This issue celebrates the Bram Stoker Awards, the “Oscars” of the horror trade. They are presented every year by the Horror Writers Association (horror.org), a group founded in 1985 (and incorporated in 1987) by a collective of masters of that genre, including Joe R. Lansdale, Karen Lansdale, Robert McCammon, and Dean Koontz. This issue is packed with short stories, flash fiction, poems, and an essay—all written by past winners of the Bram Stoker Award.

Many of us physicians started our careers with aspirations to live meaningful lives in service to others. We set off to become stewards of health and to be the beacons of light in times of sickness and death. We spent our youth studying and training in order to be doctors and to have life-long careers we can be proud of. But instead, many of us find ourselves in a health care system that prioritizes money above all else. We find ourselves forced to make decisions that go against our moral character or we are pushed to our limits to increase profitability for the system.

In recent years, cosplay—the practice of dressing up in costume as a character—has exploded, becoming a mainstream cultural phenomenon. But what are the circumstances that made its rise possible? Andrew Liptak—a member of the legendary 501st Legion, an international fan-based organization dedicated to the dark side of Star Wars—delves into the origins and culture of cosplay to answer this question. Cosplay: A History looks at the practice’s ever-growing fandom and conventions.

What is the reality of policing in the United States? Do the police keep anyone safe and secure other than the very wealthy? How do recent police killings of young Black people in the United States fit into the historical and global context of anti-blackness? This collection of reports and essays explores police violence against Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities, miscarriages of justice, and failures of token accountability and reform measures.

MediMiracle Corporation manufactures Sophrosyne, a miracle cure for opiate addiction. Ellison Ricard, a research-analyst for the company, claims to have uncovered data that proves Black users of Sophrosyne experience fatal side effects far more often than people of other races. When Ricard confronts MediMiracle’s charismatic founder and CEO, Peyton Burke, a violent confrontation ensues. The wheelchair bound Ricard—a Black man himself, severely injured years earlier—is fired that very day.

Nicholas Dowling's mail-order bride is not what he'd hoped for - she's too young, too delicate, and far too superstitious for a pragmatic man like himself. But not even Brianna's untamable spirit can't cast a shadow over her luminous beauty, and before long the blaze of their attraction grows into something neither one of them was expecting.

Former White House staffer Maggie Raster is struggling to build her own consulting firm and overcome a recent sexual assault by an ex-boss. Kyler Dawson, a broke former poker champion, desperately needs to gain entry into a controversial but potentially very lucrative international poker tournament. Maggie’s chaotic first attempt to promote her new business as a TV political analyst brings her to Kyler’s attention, and convinces him that her political smarts can provide the help he needs. When he approaches her for assistance, she must decide whether to agree.

In 1931, abandoned after their mother's suicide, young Junan and her sister, Yinan, make a pact never to leave each other. The two girls are inseparable—until Junan enters into an arranged marriage and finds herself falling in love with her soldier husband. When the Japanese invade China, Junan and her husband are separated. Unable to follow him to the wartime capital, Junan makes the fateful decision to send her sister after him.

Unique and dangerously drinkable cocktail recipes for every astrological sign, so the stars can guide your imbibing as much as they do the rest of your life.

Triumph. Tragedy. The empyreal. The infernal. Even the mundane, filtered through the fantastical. Superheroes are, appropriately enough, a sort of super-genre, encompassing all other story types. This YA anthology features thirteen short stories that creatively turn superhero tropes on their head, while still paying homage to the genre that has found fans for more than eight decades. And there will be no mistake—superheroes don’t have to just be generic handsome white dudes.

Personal crises causes change, both around you and in you. The good news is that you have the power to use this change to positively impact your future. In This Is What Matters, Dr. Perpetua Neo teaches you how to access your inner strength and wisdom and use them to navigate through the hard times so you can live a life full of meaning.

They say to never meet your heroes, but when Vivian Liao's roommate gets engaged to her favorite actor’s costar, she has no choice but to come face-to-face with Melvin Lee again. He's just as funny and handsome as he is on-screen...but thinks she is a snob and a sellout. It's none of his business how she chooses to live her life, no matter how charismatic he is.

Not since Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan has a fiction writer explored with such powerful intensity the experience of being Asian American. The characters who inhabit this extraordinary fictional debut are caught between the burden of their past history and the fragility of their unchartered future. Hunger illuminates how first-generation immigrants from China, culturally and emotionally uprooted from their homeland, mistrust connection even as they hunger for attachment - and how the past affects and shapes their children.

Each of the three seeds in this story - a cherry seed in the Middle East, an acacia seed in Australia, a lotus seed in Asia - survives a difficult journey through flood, fire, or drought, then sprouts (in the case of the lotus seed, a hundred years later) and flourishes. To author Stephie Morton, nature's powerful forces are a metaphor for the hardships faced by displaced children. Kids, like seeds, thrive when given a chance.

Millennials, people between the ages of 15 and 34, make up nearly half of the current vegan population. Despite being dealt a bad deal by prior generations, this generation is increasingly able to see past all the ways our society indoctrinates us to use nonhuman animals. Millennial Vegan offers support to this important group by providing tips for advocacy, strategies for communicating with unsupportive peers, advice on issues related to dating, and information on maintaining personal wellbeing.

Kind is the kind of poetry book that makes you think differently about our world and the beings that inhabit it. Primack explores all facets of our lives with other beings - the beauty, the tragedy, and the absurdity that surrounds her existence. Kind cuts to one’s emotional core to make us think and feel.