Night Masks

R.A. Salvatore's The Cleric Quintet tells the tale of the scholar-priest Cadderly, who is plucked from the halls of the Edificant Library to fulfill a heroic quest across the land of Faerûn. The assassins of the Night Masks stalk the shadowy streets of the city of Carradoon, led by the sinister killer known as Ghost. Cadderly struggles against the dreaded Chaos Curse in these dark, evil-haunted alleyways, with a silent death around every corner. From the Paperback edition.

In the aftermath of interplanetary war, a disfigured loner is given a chance at a new life—but at a steep cost, in this novel from “a superb storyteller” (The New York Times). Disfigured in the wars that destroyed his planet, Nik Kolherne lives a shadow existence in the sprawling refugee ghetto of the Dipple. He wears a mask to cover his scars and dreams about another country under an unfettered blue sky and a warm sun. But a chance encounter gives him the opportunity for a new face—and a new life. All he has to do is impersonate a young boy’s fantasy hero. So what if Nik is now allied with the Thieves’ Guild, a subversive outlaw group that seeks their prey on loosely held frontier worlds? A kid all alone in the world could use an ally. His mission is to lure Vandy Naudhin i’Akrama, the young son of a powerful warlord, from his high-security villa and deliver him to the Guild so they can access critical information locked in his brain. But when Nik and Vandy are shipped off to Dis, a burned-out wasteland of a planet, Nik realizes he’s a pawn in a spiraling web of political intrigue and intergalactic evil that threatens both their lives.

When her hometown is overtaken by a crime syndicate, the daughter of a disgraced Harper agent fights to free the local merchants from their underground overlords When Alias crosses swords with the underlings of the cunning, heartless lord of Westgate’s criminal guild—known only as the Faceless—he vows to destroy her. Accepting the challenge to rid Westgate of the maleficent Night Masks, Alias gathers old allies and new: the saurial paladin Dragonbait, the halfling Olive Ruskettle, the street performer Jamal, the sage Mintassan, and the charismatic Victor Dhostar, son of Westgate’s governing official. Yet even as Alias thwarts the nefarious efforts of the Night Masks, she becomes ever more entangled in the web woven by The Faceless—a web whose silken threads are spun from intrigue, political machinations, and murder. Masquerades is the tenth book in a series of loosely-connected novels about the Harpers.

The helmet-shaped mapiko masks of Mozamxadbique have garnered admiration from African art scholars and collectors alike, due to their striking aesthetics and their grotesque allure. This book restores to mapiko its historic and artistic context, charting in detail the transformations of this masquerading tradition throughout the twentieth century. Based on field research spanning seven years, this study shows how mapiko has undergone continuous reinvention by visionary individuals, has diversified into genres with broad generational appeal, and has enacted historical events and political engagements. This dense history of creativity and change has been sustained by a culture of competition deeply ingrained within the logic of ritual itself. The desire to outshine rivals on the dance ground drives performers to search for the new, the astonishing, and the topical. It is this spirit of rivalry and one-upmanship that keeps mapiko attuned to the times that it traverses. In Step with the Times is illustrated with vibrant photographs of mapiko masks and performances. It marks the most radical attempt to date to historicize an African performative tradition.

Go into the night to save the day with Catboy, Owlette, and Gekko in this 8x8 storybook based on PJ Masks, the hit preschool series airing on Disney Junior! It’s a Cat-astrophe! When Romeo kidnaps Amaya and Greg and steals their pajamas, it’s up to Catboy to save his friends! But can Catboy do it on his own, or will it take teamwork to save the day? PJ Masks © Frog Box / Entertainment One UK Limited / Walt Disney EMEA Productions Limited 2014

The young people of the Cameroon Grassfields have been subject to a long history of violence and political marginalization. For centuries the main victims of the slave trade, they became prime targets for forced labor campaigns under a series of colonial rulers. Today’s youth remain at the bottom of the fiercely hierarchical and polarized societies of the Grassfields, and it is their response to centuries of exploitation that Nicolas Argenti takes up in this absorbing and original book. Beginning his study with a political analysis of youth in the Grassfields from the eighteenth century to the present, Argenti pays special attention to the repeated violent revolts staged by young victims of political oppression. He then combines this history with extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Oku chiefdom, discovering that the specter of past violence lives on in the masked dance performances that have earned intense devotion from today’s youth. Argenti contends that by evoking the imagery of past cataclysmic events, these masquerades allow young Oku men and women to address the inequities they face in their relations with elders and state authorities today.

This remarkable study explores the use of the visual and performing arts to promote nonviolence and social harmony in sub-Saharan Africa. It focuses on Gelede, a popular community festival of masquerade, dance, and song, held several times a year by the Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria and the Republic of Benin. Babatunde Lawal, an art historian and African scholar who has taught in Nigeria, Brazil, and the United States, is himself a Yoruba and has taken an active part in Gelede. He writes from the perspective of an informed participant/observer of his own culture. Lawal bases his book on extensive field research--observations and interviews--conducted over more than two decades as well as on numerous published and unpublished scholarly sources. He casts significant new light on many previously obscure aspects of Gelede, and he demonstrates a useful methodological approach to the study of non-Western art. The book systematically covers the major aspects of the Gelede spectacle, presenting its cultural background and historical origins as preface to a vivid and detailed description of an actual performance. This is followed by a discussion of the iconography and aesthetics of costume, and an examination of the sculpted images on the masks. The book concludes with a discussion of the moral and aesthetic philosophy of Gelede and its responsiveness to technological and social change. The Gelede Spectacle is illustrated in color and black-and-white with over 100 field and museum photographs, including a rare sequence on the dressing of a masquerader. It offers, in addition, more than 60 Gelede song texts, proverbs, and divination verses, each in the original Yoruba as well as in translation. Lawal's interpretations of these pieces indicate the rich complexities of metaphor and analogy inherent in the Yoruba language and art.