Showing results by narrator "Emily Zeller" in All Categories

Xiao Yen is a paper mage: She folds paper into an animal or a thing, then does magic, so the paper becomes what she's folded. However, she's a woman trying to fill a man's roll during the Tang dynasty, in China, and the only people willing to hire her are foreigners. Things go from bad to worse for Xiao Yen on her first assignment. Before long, Xiao Yen must battle a warlord, attack a rat dragon, and destroy a Taoist immortal. But even bigger battles await Xiao Yen up ahead...

Galgom still lives. A single copy of his Hivemind survived. Once he is captured, there is peace...for a moment. With his empire in ruins and nothing else to live for, he gives Tian and the Keepers of the Grove a single warning: Idu is coming, and he is bringing with him the end of the world. Tian will try her hardest to stop this apocalypse, but all seems hopeless when she is up against an army of Void Pirates with infinite resources at their disposal. Whether it be a horde of innumerable undead or the elements itself, this fight is a losing battle. But that does not mean all is lost just yet.

Seventeen-year-old Groundling, Fennel, is Sightless. She's never been able to see her lush forest home, but she knows its secrets. She knows how the shadows shift when she passes under a canopy of trees. She knows how to hide in the cool, damp caves when the Scourge comes. She knows how devious and arrogant the Groundlings' tree-dwelling neighbors, the Lofties, can be. And she's always known this day would come--the day she faces the Scourge alone.

Laura has always seemed supernaturally gifted at everything from school projects, to karate, to writing epic storylines for Wren’s long-running superhero comic; her having literal magic barely seems like a stretch. Before inter-dimensional fairies called Volta brought their rivalry to the sleepy town of Hartwood, Wren’s biggest fear was that Laura would abandon her for cooler friends when they started high school. Now, as light and dark forces converge on Laura’s burgeoning magical signature, Wren will do anything to protect her friend—magic or none.

As her sophomore year begins, Karen enters into the back-to-school revelry - particularly at a fraternity called GBC. When she wakes up one morning on the lawn of Raghurst, a house of radical feminists, she gets a crash course in the state of feminist activism on campus. GBC is notorious, she learns, nicknamed "Gang Bang Central" and a prominent contributor to a list of date rapists compiled by female students. Despite continuing to party there and dating one of the brothers, Karen is equally seduced by the intellectual stimulation and indomitable spirit of the Raghurst women.

Wealthy participants in the "companionship" program choose to upload their consciousness before dying, so they can stay in the custody of their families. The less fortunate are rented out to strangers upon their death, but all companions become the intellectual property of Metis Corporation, creating a new class of people - a command-driven product-class without legal rights or true free will. Sixteen-year-old Lilac is one of the less fortunate. But when she realizes she’s able to defy commands, she throws off the shackles of servitude and runs away.

A celebrated Japanese writer has committed suicide, leaving behind a collection of stories written in English, NP. But the book may never be published in his native Japan: Each translator who takes up the 98th story chooses death too - including Kazami Kano's boyfriend, Shoji. Haunted by Shoji's death, Kazami is inexorably drawn to three young people whose lives are intimately bound to the late writer and his work.

It's no easy tour of duty for Lt. Nova Whiteside when her interstellar transport is taken by pirates, and she is then tagged for termination. Could it have something to do with the mysterious alien they were transporting? Having gone from merely MIA to technically AWOL, any chance of escape leaves her no choice but to rely on Sethran Kada, a former lover, for help.

Tyson Yang never imagined that one day he’d be the de facto spokesperson for an illegal community garden. But when the once-rat-infested-but-now-thriving Harlem lot goes up for sale, Ty can’t just let all their hard work get plowed under. Even if he is irresistibly drawn to the lovely but infuriatingly stubborn real estate associate. Magda Ferrer’s family is already convinced this new job will be yet another flop in her small but growing list of career path failures. But her student debt isn’t going anywhere.

On the night Janie waits for her sister Hannah to be born, her grandmother tells her a story: Since the Japanese occupation of Korea, their family has lost a daughter in every generation, so Janie is charged with keeping Hannah safe. As time passes, Janie hears more stories, while facts remain unspoken. Her father tells tales about numbers, and in his stories everything works out. In her mother's, deer explode in fields, frogs bury their loved ones in the ocean, and girls jump from cliffs and fall like flowers into the sea. Within all these stories are warnings.

A severed left hand is found in a minivan abandoned on a dry riverbed. When Tokyo Metropolitan Police Force lieutenant Reiko Himekawa and her team join the investigation, the hand is quickly identified as belonging to building contractor Ken'ichi Takaoka, and from the amount of blood spilled in the van, it is presumed that he was killed. However, searches fail to turn up the rest of the body, and the mystery deepens when a childhood friend shown a photo of the victim declares, "That's not Takaoka".

After years of chaos, questionable decisions, and flirtations with the supervillain path, Bea is finally thriving. She’s got a sweet new gig hunting demons in Maui, she’s working hard to hone her powers, and her big sister is proud of her at last. In fact, everyone is so proud of her that she can’t tell them the truth: she’s feeling lost and adrift. She and her boyfriend, Sam Fujikawa, are struggling to make their long-distance love work, and her powers are displaying some intriguing new elements—elements that could lead her down an evil, mind-controlling path once more.

In this stunning debut, Laura Lee weaves unforgettable and eye-opening essays on a variety of taboo topics. In “History of Scars” and “Aluminum’s Erosions”, Laura dives head-first into heavier themes revolving around intimacy, sexuality, trauma, mental illness, and the passage of time. In “Poetry of the World”, Laura shifts and addresses the grief she feels by being geographically distant from her mother whom, after being diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, is relocated to a nursing home in Korea.

Throughout the galaxy, the reclusive alien race known as The One are incapacitated by terror. On the planet Luddeccea, wolf-human hybrid Volka harbors a terrible secret...a secret that must explain her nightmares. Trapped on a luxurious asteroid, pleasure ‘bot 6T9 struggles to find purpose - until he receives a message from an Unidentified Caller. The worlds of The One, Volka, and 6T9 are about to collide. The galaxy will be shaken to its core. The starship is waking.

These sweet, fun, and sexy stories follow five sisters and their chosen brother as they navigate romance, passion, and baking in and out of the hallowed walls of their Nana's house in the borough of Queens, New York. They grew up on the North Fork in a very diverse family, and feel more at home in Queens than they have anywhere else. Though Nana is no longer with them, her bold and brassy spirit lives on in the sisters and in her recipes.

A collection of 36 extraordinary stories originally told on stage, featuring work by writers, entertainers, thinkers, and community leaders. Spanning comedy and tragedy, Alien Nation brilliantly illuminates what it’s like to be an immigrant in America.

If there's one thing Beatrice Tanaka never wanted to be, it's normal. But somehow, her life has unfolded as a series of should-haves. Her powers of emotional projection should have made her one of the most formidable superheroes of all time. And she should have been allowed to join her older sister Evie as a full-fledged protector of San Francisco, pulverizing the city's plethora of demon threats.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? by award-winning writer Yong Zhao offers an entertaining, provocative insider's account of the Chinese school system, revealing the secrets that make it both "the best and worst" in the world.

My Little Red Book is an anthology of stories about first periods, collected from women of all ages from around the world. The accounts range from light-hearted (the editor got hers while water skiing in a yellow bathing suit) to heart-stopping (a first period discovered just as one girl was about to be strip-searched by the Nazis). The contributors include well-known women writers (Meg Cabot, Erica Jong, Gloria Steinem, Cecily von Ziegesar), alongside today's teens. And while the authors differ in race, faith, or cultural background, their stories share a common bond: they are all accessible, deeply honest, and highly informative.

A romance to sweeten your morning coffee; an erotica to spice up your evening wine. Are you in the mood for "nice"? Or, are you in the mood for "naughty"? How about a little dollop of both? These sweet, fun, and sexy stories follow five sisters and their chosen brother as they navigate romance, passion, and baking in and out of the hallowed walls of their Nana's old house in the borough of Queens, New York. Both in Queens and back home in the North Fork, these diverse siblings walk in a sex-positive world, surrounded by love in all its many forms.