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"Funny, wild, witty, and profound.”―Victor LaValle "A wild and wonderful debut, teeming with music, family and art."—New York Times "Magical, lyrical, gritty, otherworldly…hype like Bayou Classic in the 90s."—P. Djèlí Clark One of the Best Fantasy Books of 2022: New York Times; Oprah Daily; Vulture; Gizmodo; Boston Public Library A fun and fantastical love letter to New Orleans unfolds when a battle for the city's soul brews between two young mages, a vengeful wraith, and one powerful song in this wildly imaginative debut. Nola is a city full of wonders. A place of sky trolleys and dead cabs, where haints dance the night away and Wise Women help keep the order. To those from Away, Nola might seem strange. To Perilous Graves, it’s simply home. Perry knows Nola’s rhythm as intimately as his own heartbeat. So when the city’s Great Magician starts appearing in odd places and essential songs are forgotten, Perry knows trouble is afoot. Nine songs of power have escaped from the piano that maintains the city’s beat, and without them, Nola will fail. Unwilling to watch his home be destroyed, Perry will sacrifice everything to save it. But a storm is brewing, and the Haint of All Haints is awake. Nola’s time might be coming to an end.

Supervised sequence labelling is a vital area of machine learning, encompassing tasks such as speech, handwriting and gesture recognition, protein secondary structure prediction and part-of-speech tagging. Recurrent neural networks are powerful sequence learning tools—robust to input noise and distortion, able to exploit long-range contextual information—that would seem ideally suited to such problems. However their role in large-scale sequence labelling systems has so far been auxiliary. The goal of this book is a complete framework for classifying and transcribing sequential data with recurrent neural networks only. Three main innovations are introduced in order to realise this goal. Firstly, the connectionist temporal classification output layer allows the framework to be trained with unsegmented target sequences, such as phoneme-level speech transcriptions; this is in contrast to previous connectionist approaches, which were dependent on error-prone prior segmentation. Secondly, multidimensional recurrent neural networks extend the framework in a natural way to data with more than one spatio-temporal dimension, such as images and videos. Thirdly, the use of hierarchical subsampling makes it feasible to apply the framework to very large or high resolution sequences, such as raw audio or video. Experimental validation is provided by state-of-the-art results in speech and handwriting recognition.

The Early Anglo-Saxon Period is characterized archaeologically by the regular deposition of artefacts in human graves in England. The scope for dating these objects and graves has long been studied, but it has typically proved easier to identify and enumerate the chronological problems of the material than to solve them. Prior to the work of the project reported on here, therefore, there was no comprehensive chronological framework for Early Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, and the level of detail and precision in dates that could be suggested was low. The evidence has now been studied afresh using a co-ordinated suite of dating techniques, both traditional and new: a review and revision of artefact-typology; seriation of grave-assemblages using correspondence analysis; high-precision radiocarbon dating of selected bone samples; and Bayesian modelling using the results of all of these. These were focussed primarily on the later part of the Early Anglo-Saxon Period, starting in the 6th century. This research has produced a new chronological framework, consisting of sequences of phases that are separate for male and female burials but nevertheless mutually consistent and coordinated. These will allow archaeologists to assign grave-assemblages and a wide range of individual artefact-types to defined phases that are associated with calendrical date-ranges whose limits are expressed to a specific degree of probability. Important unresolved issues include a precise adjustment for dietary effects on radiocarbon dates from human skeletal material. Nonetheless the results of this project suggest the cessation of regular burial with grave goods in Anglo-Saxon England two decades or even more before the end of the seventh century. That creates a limited but important discrepancy with the current numismatic chronology of early English sceattas. The wider implications of the results for key topics in Anglo-Saxon archaeology and social, economic and religious history are discussed to conclude the report.

When they're hauled into the office in the wake of a stupid prank, schoolmates Elliot and Shannon have no idea that hiding the principal's Smart Car in the woods was the least of their problems. As part of their punishment, the pair is tasked to clean up the school boathouse – the same one that's been shuttered for close to twenty years. Should be an easy enough task, they figure: chuck all the broken stuff, organize whatever still works and get the weekend underway. But when Shannon talks Elliot into making a Ouija board, things take a turn for the horrifying. When the pair accidentally unleashes a dark force, they find themselves caught up in a mystery that must be solved if they are to have any hope of escape.

Androcles is a brave slave. One day he escapes from his master and hides in a cave, only for a terrifying Lion to come into the cave! Little does he realise the encounter with the Lion will in fact save his life...Reading Champion offers independent reading books for children to practise and reinforce their developing reading skills.Fantastic, original stories are accompanied by engaging artwork and a reading activity. Each book has been carefully graded so that it can be matched to a child's reading ability, encouraging reading for pleasure.

In the small town of Clearwaters, a construction project uncovers old graves, The Cemetery of Secrets. Dr. Samuel Avery, a historian fascinated by the past and obscure sciences, teams up with the pragmatic architect Eleanor Prescott to unravel the mysteries hidden within the graves. As they delve deeper, they unearth clues pointing to a decades-old mass disappearance involving futuristic technology and time manipulation experiments. Their investigation leads them to the manipulative town official, Martin Caldwell, who is determined to conceal the truth at all costs. With the help of the guilt-ridden physicist Lydia Marquez and the enigmatic time-displaced test subject, Henry Gale, Sam and Eleanor navigate a dangerous web of power, deception, and ethical dilemmas. Detective Mason Rourke, initially skeptical of their wild theories, finds himself drawn into the unfolding conspiracy as strange events grip the town. As the boundaries between science and superstition blur, the characters must confront the consequences of meddling with forces beyond their understanding. "The Cemetery of Secrets" is a gripping blend of mystery, science fiction, and suspense, exploring themes of knowledge versus ignorance, science versus superstition, and the dangers of unchecked technological power. With a tone of crime, detective work, and a touch of the fantastical, this thrilling tale delves into the ethical complexities of scientific advancement and the moral responsibilities that come with pushing the boundaries of the unknown.

Lucas Graves has found a win-win in his whole dying-and-coming-back-to-life dilemma; thanks to a studious doctor that he's confided in, Lucas is getting paid to be killed for research purposes. Even better, his sort-of girlfriend Melissa has managed to find the temporary limbo that Lucas goes to when he dies, so they can be together while he's there. Lucas is quickly becoming addicted to dying, but it's taking a toll on him, both physically and mentally. His pals, Duncan and Harmony, are concerned about him, and his new friend Mercy is pressuring him to find the drug dealer responsible for allowing her to see otherworldly beings. Lucas would rather just sink into the ignorant bliss of die-get-paid-repeat, but responsibilities are a-knocking. He's just not certain that he wants to answer.

An intense drama of a white southerner and a black slave who work towards a mutual goal; by the author of R̀oots'.