A Masked Deception

A Masked Deception is the digital reissue of a previously published and long out-of-print novel by New York Times Bestselling author Mary Balogh. Margaret Wells has been deeply, hopelessly in love with the handsome, dashing Richard Adair, Earl of Brampton, since she met him at a masquerade ball six years ago. Passion had flared between them then, but she had fled before the time for unmasking. Now Richard merely needs a wife to give him an heir, and the quiet, demure Miss Wells seems as suitable as anyone else. Margaret, longing to ignite some sort of passion in her dull marriage, wonders what would happen if she were to become that masked enchantress once more and met her husband by chance in some secluded, romantic setting. Little does Margaret suspect that Richard has never forgotten the nameless charmer for whom he had searched in vain for weeks and months after the masquerade ball. And little does she suspect that he is falling in love with his wife.

Shy, demure Margaret Wells claimed the hand of dashing Richard Adair while a masked Jezebel claimed his heart. How could either of the two admit they were the same person in love with one man? A Regency romance.

Kate Mannering, a lady’s companion, is mistaken for the lady herself and kidnapped by a dashing masked highwayman. When she hears his story, however, before being released, she decides to help him recover his stolen birthright and soon gets herself embroiled in danger from smugglers and a would-be seducer. Meanwhile, an annoying, indolent guest at the home of her employer insults her at every opportunity but rescues her from every danger, even when she does not need or appreciate his help. She is alarmed to find herself falling quite inappropriately for both the highwayman and the guest.

Have you ever asked yourself why human beings are compelled to agree? Is it in our organic human nature to gather in like-minded groups and segregate ourselves from others with dissimilar opinions? Why do we feel the need to call ourselves good or right, believing only we have a firm grasp of the truth, while we label those not like us as bad or wrong? Is it possible that our compulsion to agree is an elaborate man-made control mechanism, rooted in fear? James Beyor points out in The Abyss, the second book in his Guarded Hearts trilogy, that we live in a dangerous time, where our agreements are causing us great mental and biological harm. Humankind is suffering from a bio-mental decrepitude. We have been duped into living out a symbolic replica of our human life potential. Beyor points to an urgent need we must all address, which, if we do not, will bring about anther period of inquisition far more insane and destructive than has been suffered by men in the past. This inquisition will require secular obedience as defined by a government out of control. He points to many fundamental elements that foreshadow unparalleled atrocities inflicted on the mentally and biologically impaired human species. This is not just another doomsday tale; it is a message of hope that we can, if we act now, reestablish our innate inner directed sense of all knowing built and begin again to live an authentic life. The people of the world watch helplessly as our institutions falter in their insatiable struggle for dominance over the human race. We must reclaim individual clarity and wean ourselves from our dependency on agreements of symbols and words. In the Beyor Journals you will come face to face with yourself and become aware of your own innate clarity; a genesis gift available to all those who have the courage to join then the great awakening; who claim their right to a living truth. You will never again wonder what is behind your successes and failures.

Legendary artist John Romita Sr. makes his Marvel Age debut, and he's taking Daredevil straight into the heart of the Savage Land! There, DD will battle the Plunderer - and meet none other than Ka-Zar! Then, it's a Daredevil/Spider-Man team-up featuring Romita's first-ever Spidey art! The adventure pits the two high-flying heroes against the Masked Marauder - but only after they duke it out themselves! Next comes the debut of Daredevil's classic nemesis the Gladiator - and before you know it, another amazing artist debuts: the unforgettable Gene Colan! Just in time to close out our volume, the Dean of Delineation lends his pencil to the first of what would become a nearly uninterrupted seven-year tenure on the Man Without Fear! Collecting DAREDEVIL (1964) #12-21.

"Madness, Masks, and Laughter: An Essay on Comedy is an exploration of narrative and dramatic comedy as a laughter-inducing phenomenon. The theatrical metaphors of mask, appearance, and illusion are used as structural linchpins in an attempt to categorize the many and extremely varied manifestations of comedy and to find out what they may have in common with one another. As this reliance on metaphor suggests, the purpose is less to produce The Truth about comedy than to look at how it is related to our understanding of the world and to ways of understanding our understanding. Previous theories of comedy or laughter (such as those advanced by Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Freud, and Bakhtin) as well as more general philosophical considerations are discussed insofar as they shed light on this approach. The limitations of the metaphors themselves mean that sight is never lost of the deep-seated ambiguity that has made laughter so notoriously difficult to pin down in the past." "The first half of the volume focuses in particular on traditional comic masks and the pleasures of repetition and recognition, on the comedy of imposture, disguise, and deception, on dramatic and verbal irony, on social and theatrical role-playing and the comic possibilities of plays-within-plays and "metatheatre," as well as on the cliches, puns, witticisms, and torrents of gibberish which betray that language itself may be understood as a sort of mask. The second half of the book moves to the other side of the footlights to show how the spectators themselves, identifying with the comic spectacle, may be induced to "drop" their own roles and postures, laughter here operating as something akin to a ventilatory release from the pressures of social or cognitive performance. Here the essay examines the subversive madness inherent in comedy, its displaced anti-authoritarianism, as well as the violence, sexuality, and bodily grotesqueness it may bring to light. The structural tensions in this broadly Hobbesian or Freudian model of a social mask concealing an anti-social self are reflected in comedy's own ambivalences, and emerge especially in the ambiguous concepts of madness and folly, which may be either celebrated as festive fun or derided as sinfulness. The study concludes by considering the ways in which nonsense and the grotesque may infringe our cognitive limitations, here extending the distinction between appearance and reality to a metaphysical level which is nonetheless prey to unresolvable ambiguities." "The scope of the comic material ranges over time from Aristophanes to Martin Amis, from Boccaccio, Chaucer, Rabelais, and Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde, Joe Orton, John Barth, and Philip Roth. Alongside mainly Old Greek, Italian, French, Irish, English, and American examples, a number of relatively little-known German plays (by Grabbe, Tieck, Buchner, and others) are also taken into consideration."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved