Daily Fantasy

Daniel Barbarisi quits his job as the New York Yankees beat writer for The Wall Street Journal and begins a quest: to join the top 1 percent of Daily Fantasy Sports ("DFS") players, the so-called "sharks", and figure out whether DFS is on the level - while maybe cashing in along the way. DFS is fantasy sports on steroids. It's the domain of bitter rivals FanDuel and DraftKings, online juggernauts who turned a legal loophole into a billion-dollar industry by allowing sports fans to bet piles of cash constructing fantasy teams.

The ads enthused, "The virtual lands of Mirror World await you! Live out your most secret dreams in our world of Sword and Sorcery! Become a Great Wizard or a Famous Warrior! Build your own castle, tame a dragon, conquer a kingdom! All those desperate, lonely, and insecure - Mirror World offers you a chance!" But Oleg isn't meant to become a great wizard or a famous warrior. He'll never have a castle of his own. Nor will he ever tame a dragon. And he's definitely not the type to conquer a kingdom, however virtual it may be.

Working as overnight tech support, James Lyle has long said he’d do anything to escape the boredom. But his commitment to excitement is tested when a slight coincidence one shift sends him to a different part of his office building . . . and he discovers a stairwell that contains not stairs but rather a landscape of seemingly infinite cubicles against a distant horizon. Unwilling (and unable) to stay away, James and a few of his trusted friends begin to explore this endless maze of supernatural business ennui.

James Lyle has achieved his career goal of being promoted from IT professional to wizard, wielding magic against deadly sentient office supplies in an alternate-reality corporate dungeon. He's become the reluctant leader of the Order of Endless Rooms, a band of professional heroes dedicated to acquiring the skills, knowledge, and power to help people in need and improve the world in general.

Ever since James Lyle found an alternate dimension hidden in the stairwell of his workplace, things have been, well, weird. For one thing, when he’s not working the night shift, he’s battling killer mail carts and ravenous swarms of sticky notes. For another, he’s dealing with some very complex and intense emotions for several of his friends. Meanwhile, his parents have offloaded his younger sister on him. As if all this weren’t enough, James’s voyages into the dungeon world seem to be having a strange effect on the world in which he actually lives.

You might think a month away from fighting sentient cubical supplies in a threatening alt-reality office would mean a break for James Lyle. But . . . you'd be wrong. Even though James has taken a beat from adventuring into the dungeon hidden within the stairwell of his workplace, he's been dealing with plenty of stress-inducing issues, from raising a recently corporeal infomorph to navigating his newly minted relationship with his best friends, fighting his own depression, and wrestling with the moral implications of his burgeoning powers.

James Lyle, Anesh Patel, and Alanna Byrne have spent much of the past year exploring a secret realm in which the phrase "cubicle hell" isn't just a metaphor. Stalked like prey by sentient staplers and hostile computer hardware, the trio has managed to amass a collection of magical abilities that are rapidly adding up to something more significant. But they aren't content to just sit back and take it easy; rather, they hope to harness their newfound power to benefit humanity.

This audiobook contains six fantasy and sci-fi short stories perfect for your morning commute. Each story is self-contained.

In a world where almost everyone has a superpower, Sam Archer finds himself with one of the most useless abilities of all - immortality. Sure, he can’t die, but he sure as hell can’t fight back either. If anything, the incapacity to die has turned out to be a hassle for Sam, with ridiculous requests for obnoxious favors being a primary concern. However, his coworker Lily Dodson is about to make his life a lot more interesting with her unique proposal. Warning: This book contains adult content that may not be suitable for all audiences.

Come sit by the hearth and enjoy a pint and well packed pipe with Andrew, a seventeen-year-old tinker from a nearby swamp, in this feel-good slice of life, as he tells a tale of tree horses, Night Watchmen and the mythical being covered in eyes that grants dangerous wishes. It’s Eden Vale, a Festival of Lights, in Jatoba, a cozy village nestled high in the hills where Andrew is trying to ply his trade when a blizzard forces him into the leaning cottage on the edge of town that everyone fears.

WB and Feral have survived the attack on SPARK, but the terrorists are not through. Forces intent on stealing the technology behind Black Grass and the AI necessary to make it work are on the move again. As WB and Feral attempt to return to their normal lives, they realize that the enemy will never quit until they have the tech or SPARK itself is destroyed. Flying below the radar kept them safe before, but increased notoriety works against the two as everyone from the FBI to gang members know who they are. Now, local bureaucrats, terrorists, and even fans intrude on the gamers’ lives.

In his mother’s last letter, she wrote, “Find me. Save me.” And Will Kwan had heard those words before. He’d heard them in a video game. Solar Prime Augmented Reality Park, or SPARK, is a theme park for gamers: a sprawling virtual reality complex with quests and games that appeal to all ages. But beneath the surface, SPARK harbors many a secret. When sixteen-year-old Will has to escape the foster system, SPARK is his destination. “Find me. Save me.” What had his mother meant?

When Maxon met Sunny, he was seven years, four months, and eighteen-days old. Or, he was 2693 rotations of the earth old. Maxon was different. Sunny was different. They were different together. Now, twenty years later, they are married, and Sunny wants, more than anything, to be "normal." She's got the housewife thing down perfectly, but Maxon, a genius engineer, is on a NASA mission to the moon, programming robots for a new colony. Once they were two outcasts who found unlikely love in each other: a wondrous, strange relationship formed from urgent desire for connection.

Life after the apocalypse is one daily grind after another. It's a good thing for Wendy that she's got friends - a lot of friends as a fairy summoner. But life in Exeter is not easy, even for a summoner, and the grind of daily jobs and never-ending quests is getting to her. She's got one shot at getting a place for her own, a place of safety and maybe getting ahead. But it'll require Wendy to do the one thing she swore she'd never do again.