Subterfuge and assassination bring this thrilling series to an end. Despite the odds, the Imperium has triumphed. The orks have been defeated and the Great Beast is no more. Across the length and breadth of the galaxy, humankind celebrates its salvation, and relishes the prospect of a return of peace. But the war against the orks has riven the political bedrock of the Imperium, exposing its rotten core. One man, one powerful man, decides he has the solution, and launches a campaign of destruction so terrible that thousands of years later his actions will still be viewed with horror. And all the while, the true enemy watches and waits in the starless depths of space; an eternal evil that desires only to devour the souls of every living human soul in the galaxy.

'The Beheading' is the title piece of this spectacular collection of true stories and commentaries. It is an eye-witness account of a beheading in the desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia where the author witnessed savage and soul-destroying punishments. They are recounted in this book with great clarity and brutal honesty, but with the sensitivity and poignancy born of the insight of a man who has studied the culture and history of this land with meticulous care. But these stories are not for the squeamish. They are required reading for those who are concerned about the inhumane and barbaric practices carried out around the world and have the stomach to read of such chilling things. Included in this collection is a shocking account of an adulterous woman stoned to death. 'Women Are Always To Blame' achieves a particular relevance in light of recent worldwide concerns about this practice. In 'Extracts from my Diary', Bob Crew reveals how his predictions regarding what would not change in Saudi Arabia in the new Millennium have been remarkably prescient.

Set in a Mediterranean country, this powerful play portrays the harm that can be done to people by spiritual corruption and the misuse of innocence. It is a study of maneuver for power between church and state and in which the frustrations of a woman, the honesty of a man and the faith of a young priest are deliberately involved until all three are destroyed by the bishop and the president who manipulate them like chess pieces.

Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude," an imaginary crime that defies definition. Cincinnatus spends his last days in an absurd jail, where he is visited by chimerical jailers, an executioner who masquerades as a fellow prisoner, and by his in-laws, who lug their furniture with them into his cell. When Cincinnatus is led out to be executed, he simply wills his executioners out of existence: they disappear, along with the whole world they inhabit.

The province of Quebec used to be called the priest-ridden province by its Protestant neighbors in Canada. During the 1960s, Quebec became radically secular, directly leading to its evolution as a welfare state with lay social services. What happened to cause this abrupt change? Genevieve Zubrzycki gives us an elegant and penetrating history, showing that a key incident sets up the transformation. Saint John the Baptist is the patron saint of French Canadians, and, until 1969, was subject of annual celebrations with a parade in Montreal. That year, the statue of St. John was toppled by protestors, breaking off the head from the body. Here, then is the proximate cause: the beheading of a saint, a symbolic death to be sure, which caused the parades to disappear and other modes of national celebration to take their place. The beheading of the saint was part and parcel of the so-called Quiet Revolution, a period of far-reaching social, economic, political, and cultural transformations. Quebec society and the identity of its French-speaking members drastically reinvented themselves with the rejection of Catholicism. Zubrzycki is already acknowledged as a leading authority on nationalism and religion; this book will significantly enlarge her stature by showing the extent to which a core feature of the Quiet Revolution was an aesthetic revolt. A new generation rejected the symbols of French Canada, redefining national identity in the process (and as a process) and providing momentum for institutional reforms. We learn that symbols have causal force, generating chains of significations which can transform a Catholic-dominated conservative society into a leftist, forward-looking, secular society."

In the final act of The Beast Arises saga, the Imperium is brought to its knees and the orks seek to usurp mankind and establish dominance over the galaxy in this omnibus edition that contains books nine to twelve in the series. The Imperium’s initial attempts to attack the orks and kill their leader have ended in failure and tragedy, but there can be no surrender: the fate of humanity hangs in the balance. New, more flexible fighting teams of Adeptus Astartes have been assembled and allies from the Imperium’s past have also pledged their support. With new troops, revised tactics and the full backing of the Adeptus Mechanicus, the Space Marines head to the orks’ home world one final time. This time there will be no retreat. They must succeed in their mission… or die in the attempt. "}" style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: center;">‘The Beast Arises’ is an epic Warhammer 40,000 series from Black Library. Spanning twelve volumes, the story covers a galaxy-wide conflict between humanity and a massive ork invasion. The Imperium’s initial attempts to attack the orks and kill their leader have ended in failure and tragedy, but there can be no surrender: the fate of humanity hangs in the balance. New, more flexible fighting teams of Adeptus Astartes have been assembled and allies from the Imperium’s past have also pledged their support. With new troops, revised tactics and the full backing of the Adeptus Mechanicus, the Space Marines head to the orks’ home world one final time. This time there will be no retreat. They must succeed in their mission… or die in the attempt.

"Flamboyant New York theatre director Ren is passionately in love with Jack, a younger man who is still under the thumb of his conservative CEO father, Malcolm. Jack's differences with his father range from the fact that Jack is still in the closet regarding his sexuality to having to endure his father's platitudes about self-improvement and his contempt for Ren. The fact that his father's oil company is dumping toxic waste into the Hudson River doesn't help since cleaning up the river is one of Jack's missions in life. Tensions mount when Jack becomes critically ill with lymphoma and has to undergo a bone marrow transplant which will either cure him or kill him. At the same time that Ren is tending to Jack in the hospital, he is busy staging his version of & quot;Gawain and the Green Knight. & quot; His struggles with Malcolm over Jack's love lead Ren to question the values of the medieval story especially the blind loyalty of the young vassal to his lord and he ends by inverting these feudal values in a wild cross-gendered sail against the currents of History. Behind this shift in dramaturgy is Ren's gradual realization that the battles that count for him as a modern (loving) man are fought by changing bedpans and bandages, not waving lances and swords. Life and theatre become intertwined as Ren increasingly lives his life as drama, enacting ever more baroque and occasionally risky fantasies of revenge and Love's riumph. Beyond the ambiguities of gender and sexual orientation, The Beheading Game finds that the issues of love and death, honesty and loyalty, are the same for all of us."--Publisher's website.