Books with author Gail Jorgensen

PROJECT HALO is a YA sci-fi thriller taking place in near-future Norway. It has speculative elements and would appeal to fans of THE MAZE RUNNER and BLACK MIRROR.All seventeen-year-old Charlie Walker wants is to be free of his father’s stupid expectations. Stay in school? No thanks. Get a job? Nope. Stop cursing? Hell no. But if he knew his petty rebellion would result in his own kidnapping, he might’ve reconsidered.When Charlie wakes up at Norway’s largest intelligence agency, the NIC, with a biochip in his brain, he faces problems bigger than his father’s disapproval. Charlie is their first successful experiment, and when activated, the chip will give the agency unbarred access to his vital signs and location. So much for freedom. But before his biochip can be activated, a rogue doctor offers Charlie a chance to escape. In return, he has to find and keep a flash drive hidden from the NIC.At first, agreeing to the deal seems obvious. But when NIC sends agents to hunt Charlie down, he realizes the flash drive might be more important than he thought. He’s faced with an ultimatum: hand over the flash drive, or a lethal virus will be released onto the population. If he obliges, his chip will be activated and he’ll lose his freedom forever. If he doesn’t, people will die—including his ex-friend-who-he-totally-still-hates. Including the charming hacker he has a crush on. Including his demanding father. Including himself.In a race against time and his own selfish thoughts, Charlie must decide who to trust with his deadly secret—and exactly how far he’s willing to go in the name of freedom.

Korea has long had an underground insurrectionary literature. The best-known example of the genre is the Chŏng Kam nok, a collection of premodern texts predicting the overthrow of the Yi Dynasty (1392–1910) that in recent times has been invoked by a wide range of groups to support various causes and agendas: from leaders of Korea’s new religious movements formed during and after the Japanese occupation to spin doctors in the South Korean elections of the 1990s to proponents of an aborted attempt to move the capital from Seoul in the early 2000s.Written to inspire uprisings and foment dissatisfaction, the Chŏng Kam nok texts are anonymous and undated. (Most were probably written between the seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries.) In his expansive introduction to this first English translation, John Jorgensen notes that the work employs forms or codes of political prediction (Ch. tuch’en; Kor. toch’am) allied with Chinese geomancy (fengshui) but in a combination unique to Korea. The two types of codes appear to deal with different subjects—the potency of geographical locations and political predictions derived from numerological cycles, omens, and symbols—but both emerge from a similar intellectual sphere of prognostication arts that includes divination, the Yijing (Book of Changes), physiognomy, and astrology in early China, and both share theoretical components, such as the fluctuation of ki (Ch. qi). In addition to ambiguous and obscure passages, allusion and indirection abound; many predictions are attributed to famous people in the distant past or made after the fact to lend the final outcome an air of authority. Jorgensen’s invaluable introduction contains a wealth of background on the history and techniques of political prediction, augury, and geomancy from the first-century Han dynasty in China to the end of the nineteenth century in Korea, providing readers with a thorough account of East Asian geomancy based on original sources.This volume will be welcomed by students and scholars of premodern Korean history and beliefs and those with an interest in early, arcane sources of political disinformation that remain relevant in South Korea to this day.

Cleo's world has never been ordinary, but when her cousin shows up in a coffin bringing the family's dark secret with him, she knows her life will never be the same. Despite her efforts, Cleo is dragged into a web of antics that bring her face to face with a living nightmare. For Cleo, not making a choice about her life could mean a fate worse than death.