NATIONAL BESTSELLEROpen borders, record inflation, and skyrocketing
crime—Joe Biden’s first term is one of the most craptastic in American
history. But on Planet Brandon, it’s all going according to plan . . .He
received 81 million votes. His party controlled the House and the Senate.
He took office with a nearly 60 percent approval rating. His first month
saw the economy recovering nicely and the new COVID-19 vaccines being
distributed around the country. And, in his words, he had the awesome power
to mobilize “truinernashabada pressure.”And yet, with all that and more,
Joe Biden’s first term has been a spectacular failure. COVID roared back.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan left thirteen U.S. service members dead and
hundreds of Americans stranded as Afghans fell from airplanes. Sixteen
American cities set homicide records. More than 2.3 million illegal
immigrants entered the country. Inflation reached forty-year highs. And
Russia invaded Ukraine. Even the Democrats are so embarrassed, they won’t
invite Biden to join them on the campaign trail for the midterms. Gah.But
is this hot mess, dumpster fire of a record only because Biden lost
whatever fastball he had and is perpetually incompetent? In Come On, Man!,
Joe Concha reminds us what’s really going on in the White House. Though
Biden may seem like a doddering idiot, stumbling from one mistake to the
next, his blunders always hew closely to progressive dreams for American
policy. Dreams like saving the planet by attacking Elon Musk and
strengthening the middle class by making gas prices higher than Hunter
Biden in a motel room. Come On, Man! shows the real reason why we’re
here—no malarkey, guaranteed! Read more

A sharp, funny, and honest collection of real-life stories from Kelly
Ripa, showing the many dimensions and crackling wit of the beloved daytime
talk show host.In Live Wire, her first book, Kelly shows what really makes
her tick. As a professional, as a wife, as a daughter and as a mother, she
brings a hard-earned wisdom and an eye for the absurdity of life to every
minute of every day. It is her relatability in all of these roles that has
earned her fans worldwide and millions of followers on social media.
Whether recounting how she and Mark really met, the level of chauvinism she
experienced on set, how Jersey Pride follows her wherever she goes, and
many, many moments of utter mortification (whence she proves that you
cannot, in fact, die of embarrassment) Kelly always tells it like it
is. Ms. Ripa takes no prisoners.Surprising, at times savage, a little
shameless and always with humor… Live Wire shows Kelly as she really is
offscreen—a very wise woman who has something to say. Read more

Stephanie Plum breaks the rules, flirts with disaster, and shows who’s
boss in this “fast and fun” (Publishers Weekly) thriller from #1 New York
Times bestselling author Janet Evanovich.Monday mornings aren’t supposed to
be fun, but they should be predictable. However, on this particular Monday,
Stephanie Plum knows that something is amiss when she turns up for work at
Vinnie’s Bail Bonds to find that longtime office manager Connie Rosolli,
who is as reliable as the tides in Atlantic City, hasn’t shown up.
Stephanie’s worst fears are confirmed when she gets a call from Connie’s
abductor. He says he will only release her in exchange for a mysterious
coin that a recently murdered man left as collateral for his bail.
Unfortunately, this coin, which should be in the office—just like Connie—is
nowhere to be found. The quest to discover the coin, learn its value, and
save Connie will require the help of Stephanie’s Grandma Mazur, her best
pal Lula, her boyfriend Morelli, and hunky security expert Ranger. As they
get closer to unraveling the reasons behind Connie’s kidnapping, Connie’s
captor grows more threatening and soon Stephanie has no choice but to throw
caution to the wind, follow her instincts, and go rogue. Full of surprises,
thrills, and humor, Going Rogue reveals a new side of Stephanie Plum, and
shows Janet Evanovich at her scorching, riotous best. Read more

Chapter 1 the yurt The last thing Orion said to me, the absolute bastard,
was El, I love you so much. And then he shoved me backwards through the
gates of the Scholomance and I landed thump on my back in paradise, the
soft grassy clearing in Wales that I’d last seen four years ago, ash trees
in full green leaf and sunlight dappling through them, and Mum, Mum right
there waiting for me. Her arms were full of flowers: poppies, for rest;
anemones, for overcoming; moonwort, for forgetfulness; morning glories, for
the dawn of a new day. A welcome-­home bouquet for a trauma victim, meant
to ease horror out of my mind and make room for healing and for rest, and
as she reached to help me, I heaved myself up howling, “Orion!” and sent
the whole thing scattering before me. A few months—­aeons—­ago, while we’d
still been in the midst of our frantic obstacle-­course runs, an enclaver
from Milan had given me a translocation spell in Latin, the rare kind that
you can cast on yourself without splitting yourself into bits. The idea was
that I’d be able to use it to hop around from one place to another in the
graduation hall—­all the better to save people like enclavers from Milan,
which is why she’d handed me a spell worth five years of mana for free. You
couldn’t normally use it to go long distances, but time was more or less
the same thing as space, and I’d been in the Scholomance ten seconds
before. I had the hall visualized as crisp and clear as an architectural
drawing, complete with the horrific mass of Patience and the horde of
maleficaria behind it, boiling its way towards us. I was placing myself at
the gates, right back where I had been when Orion had given me that final
shove. But the spell didn’t want to be cast, putting up resistance like
warning signs across the way: dead end, road washed out ahead. I forced it
through anyway, throwing mana at it, and the casting rebounded in my face
and knocked me down like I’d run straight into a concrete wall. So I got
back up and tried the exact same spell again, only to get pasted flat a
second time. My head was ringing bells and noise. I crawled back to my
feet. Mum was helping me up, but she was also holding me back, saying
something to me, trying to slow me down, but I only snarled at her,
“Patience was coming right at him!” and her hands were slack, sliding off
me with her own remembered horror. It had already been two minutes since
I’d been dumped out; two minutes was forever in the graduation hall, even
before I’d packed it full of all the monsters in the world. But the
interruption did stop me just banging my head against the gates repeatedly.
I spent a moment thinking, and then I tried to use a summoning to get Orion
out, instead. Most people can’t summon anything larger or with more
willpower than a hair bobble. But the many summoning spells I’ve
unwillingly collected over the years are all intended to bring me one or
more hapless screaming victims, presumably to go into the sacrificial pit
I’ve incomprehensibly neglected to set up. I had a dozen varieties, and one
of them that let you scry someone through a reflective surface and pull
them out. It’s especially effective if you have a gigantic cursed mirror of
doom to use. Sadly I’d left mine hanging on the wall of my dorm room. But I
ran around the clearing and found a small puddle of water between two tree
roots. That wouldn’t have been good enough ordinarily, but I had endless
mana flowing into me, the supply line from graduation still open. I threw
power behind the spell and forced the muddy puddle smooth as glass and
staring down at it called, “Orion! Orion Lake! I call you in the—­” I took
a quick glance up at the first sunlight and sky I’d seen in four years of
longing for them, and the only thing I could feel was desperate frustration
that it wasn’t dawn or noon or midnight or anything helpful, “—­waxing
hours of the light, to come to me from the dark-shadowed halls, heeding my
word alone,” which would very likely mean he’d be under a spell of
obedience when he got here, but I’d worry about that later, later after he
was here—­ The spell did go through this time, and the water churned into a
cloud of silver-­black that slowly and grudgingly served up a ghostly image
that might have been Orion from the back, barely an outline against pitch
darkness. I shoved my arm into the dark anyway, reaching for him, and for a
moment, I thought—­I was sure—­I had him. The taste of frantic relief
swelled through me: I’d done it, I’d got hold of him—­and then I screamed,
because my fingers were sinking into the surface of a maw-­mouth, with its
sucking hunger turning on me. Every part of my body wanted to let go at
once. And then it got worse, as if there were any room for that to get
worse, because it wasn’t just one maw-­mouth, it was two, grabbing at me
from both sides, as if Patience hadn’t quite finished digesting Fortitude
yet: a whole century of students, a meal so large it would take a long
while eating, and meanwhile Fortitude was still groping around trying to
feed its own hunger even while it was being swallowed down. And it had been
blindingly obvious to me back there in the graduation hall that we couldn’t
possibly kill that monstrous agglomerated horror, not even with the mana of
four thousand living students fueling me. The only thing to do with
Patience was the only thing to do with the Scholomance: we could only push
them off into the void, and hope they vanished away forever. But apparently
Orion had disagreed, since he’d turned back to fight even with the school
teetering on the edge of the world behind him. As if he’d thought Patience
was going to get out, and in some part of his stupid brutalized brain
imagined that he could stop it getting out, and therefore he had to stay
behind and be a hero this one more time, one boy standing in front of a
tidal wave. That was the only possible reason I could imagine, and it had
been stupid enough without shoving me out the gates first, when I was the
only one of us who’d ever actually fought a maw-­mouth before. That made it
so unutterably stupid that I needed him out, needed him here, so I could
scream at him at length to impress upon him exactly how stupid he’d been. I
clung to that rage. Rage made it possible for me to keep holding on,
despite the heaving putrescence of maw-­mouth trying to envelop my fingers,
sucking on my skin and my shielding like a child trying to get through a
candy shell to the better sweetness inside, trying to get to me, trying to
get to every last bit of me so it could devour me down to staring eyes and
screaming mouth. Rage, and horror, because it was going to do that to
Orion, Orion who was still there in the hall with it. So I didn’t let go.
Staring down into the scrying puddle, I hurled murder at it past his
blurry, half-­seen shoulder, casting my best, quickest, killing spell over
and over, the feeling of a lake of rot sloughing away from around my hands
each time, until I was gulping down nausea with each breath I took, and
each casting of “À la mort!” went rolling off my tongue on the way out,
blurring until the sound of my breathing was death. All the while I kept
holding on, trying to pull Orion out. Even if it meant I’d heave Patience
out into the world with him and spill that devouring horror into the cool
green trees of Wales right at Mum’s feet, my place of peace I’d dreamt of
in every minute I’d been in the Scholomance. All I’d have to do was kill
it, after all. That had seemed utterly impossible five minutes before, so
impossible I’d just laughed at the idea, but now it was only a low and
trivial hurdle, when the alternative was letting it have Orion instead. I
was really good at killing things. I’d find a way. I even had a plan laying
itself out in my head, the clockwork machinery of strategy ticking coolly
away in the background of my mind where it never stopped after four years
in the Scholomance. We’d fight Patience together. I’d kill it a few dozen
lives at a time, and he could pull the mana out and feed it back to me, and
together we’d create an unending killing circle between us until the thing
was finally gone. It would work, it would work. I had myself convinced. I
didn’t let go. I didn’t let go. I was pushed off. Again. Read more