Showing results by narrator "David Bendena" in All Categories

Walter had spent all summer counting down the days until the first day of school. He couldn’t wait to make new shark friends and finally swim into his classroom for the first time. But the first class picture of the year changes everything. Walter realizes there is one big difference between him and his shark classmates. After his discovery, Walter spends his day trying anything he can think of to blend in with the other sharks, only to learn that the things that make us feel like we don’t fit in are the very things that make us stand out.

Just as Jeremiah Goodbye is set to meet his fate in the electric chair, he is given a second chance at life. With the flip of a coin, he decides to return to his home town of Nowhere, Oklahoma, to settle the score with his twin brother Josiah. But upon his escape, he enters a world he doesn’t recognize—one that has been overtaken by the Dust Bowl. And the gift he once relied on to guide him is as unrecognizable as the path back to Nowhere.

They say that the Sphere of Worlds has no limits and that its players enter a new universe brimming with mysteries. And this universe is now readying to defend itself. Whoever has got involved in the game just can't stop anymore. In the search for the Keys, Cat and Weldy set off for the Abyss—the netherworlds of the Sphere—where Cat is about to play against the strongest of all the oracles: the legendary Demon King. And the stake in the game is horrendously simple: Cat's own life.

In the endless game of Sphere of Words, the trader named Cat continues searching for the Keys hidden by the dead creators of the virtual reality.

Will true artificial intelligences be able to appreciate or even create art? Explore dystopian societies, where AI generates most of the content and human artists must eke out an existence, and utopias where artificial minds help unlock and enhance human creativity.

Meet Cat. He thinks everything has its price. You can pay in gold, or you pay in steel. And for the right price, even the entire Sphere of Worlds can be bought. Ever the merchant, he pays in souls, freeing the Goddess of Darkness in the astral fortress of Pandorum and becoming the archnemesis of the most powerful alliance in all of Sphere. Even as an enormous bounty is placed on his head with hunters trailing his every move, he never wavers. His patron, the God of Shadows, sends Cat to the twilight world of the Hole to find the third of the seven Keys.

The Seven Keys have been collected, and the world created solely to entertain has come alive. The one who gains control over them will rule Sphere. Who will it be—the Demon King, the digitized players, the corporations, or the people hiding under the masks of the Seven Brothers? The stakes are higher than ever, and the merchant’s life is once again at risk—after all, he holds one of the Keys that grant the power to create and destroy worlds at will.

Firmly rooted in the modern American West, this story collection follows women and families who feel the instinctual, inexplicable pull of a home they must work to protect from the effects of economic inequity and climate catastrophe. A 74-year-old nun turns to eco-sabotage to stop a fracking project. A woman delivers her own baby in a Nevada ghost town. A young farmer hides her chicken flock from the government during a bird-flu epidemic. An ornithologist returns home to care for her rancher father and gets caught up trying to protect a breeding group of endangered sage grouse.