The Mask Falls

The stunning fourth novel in the New York Times bestselling Bone Season series, now updated with the author's preferred text and a gorgeous new design. Paige Mahoney has eluded death again. Snatched from the jaws of captivity and sent to a safe house in the Scion Citadel of Paris, she finds herself caught between factions that seek Scion's downfall and those who would kill to protect the puppet empire. The mysterious Domino Program has plans for Paige, but she has ambitions of her own in this new citadel. With Arcturus at her side, she embarks on an adventure that will lead her from the catacombs of Paris to the glittering hallways of Versailles. As Scion widens its bounds and the free world trembles in its shadow, Paige strives to understand her bond with Arcturus, which grows stronger by the day. But there are those who know the revolution began with them-and could end with them . . .

He was born that way. Few would forgive his appearance. Fear and revulsion, even rage, were not unfamiliar to him. The villagers, but for one small child, have not been kind. The forest, his home, was not only a sanctuary, ironically, it also became his prison. One day, the forest offered him something more. What he found both chilled and excited him. It was a discovery that would change his life forever. The Mask is an allegorical tale that touches upon our human frailties, inspires us to find our inner truth, and dares us to be more courageous than we can imagine. Beautifully illustrated and designed, The Mask compels a reader to ponder important social issues such as bullying and body image as well as the meaning of beauty and truth.

A lavishly reimagined and revised tenth anniversary edition of the New York Times bestselling first novel in the sensational Bone Season series, by the author of The Priory of the Orange Tree. “Intelligent, inventive, dark, and engrossing.” NPR Welcome to Scion. No safer place. The year is 2059. For two centuries, the Republic of Scion has led an oppressive campaign against unnaturalness in Europe. In London, Paige Mahoney holds a high rank in the criminal underworld. The right hand of the ruthless White Binder, Paige is a dreamwalker, a rare and formidable kind of clairvoyant. Under Scion law, she commits treason simply by breathing. When Paige is arrested for murder, she meets the mysterious founders of Scion, who have designs on her uncommon abilities. If she is to survive and escape, Paige must use every skill at her disposal – and put her trust in someone who ought to be her enemy.

A stunning new edition of the second novel in the bestselling Bone Season series with gorgeous new cover artwork and updated text, by the bestselling author of The Priory of the Orange Tree. Paige Mahoney has escaped the secret prison city of Oxford. Now a fugitive in London, she nurtures a new taste for revolution. Oxford may be behind her, but the Republic of Scion is undefeated. As Scion turns its all-seeing eye on Paige, she is forced to return to Jaxon Hall, her charismatic and brutal employer, to keep her foothold in the underworld. But Paige will bow to only one now, and not even Jaxon will stop her exposing the corruption in the syndicate. As she plots to with the fabled Rose Crown, both sides of an ancient conflict seek her talents for themselves.

"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

The story of a man coming to terms with his homosexuality in traditional Japanese society has become a modern classic.