The intriguing beginning of a brilliant new fantasy trilogy from the master of magic, Michael Pryor. Kingsley Ward is in dire trouble. Instead of thrilling the audience with his death-defying escapology, his first performance ends in disaster when his hidden wolfish nature bursts free. That same night, his father is abducted and his home ransacked. To find Dr Ward and redeem himself, Kingsley braves the Demimonde, the mysterious world that exists alongside our own. He is soon the target of two warring factions: immortal magicians whose diabolical plans will create mayhem at the 1908 Olympics, and the last Neanderthals, whose vengeance will wipe out humankind. Kingsley needs help. The famous author Rudyard Kipling will assist, but why is he so interested in Kingsley? Evadne Stephens, juggler and weaponsmith, is a Demimonde expert - but what does her mercurial nature conceal? Bizarre plots. Sinister magic. The extraordinary is about to happen . . .

Magician Kingsley Ward travels to the mysterious world called Demimonde in an effort to redeem himself after his first performance ends in disaster and his father is abducted, and he soon finds himself the target of two warring factions.

This book offers the first full-length study of the chess structures, motifs, and imagery in William Faulkner's Knight's Gambit . Wainwright looks at the importance of chess as a literary device and examines the structural analogy drawn between the game and linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure.

Still broadcast in syndication across the U.S., the urbane British program "The Avengers" went through many changes in the course of its run. This volume provides an overview of the series, a show-by-show guide to each episode, a comprehensive guide to memorabilia, and more than 200 photographs of England's most dashing crime fighters.

Once upon a time, in a land Down Under, from the depths of the Clan cave, Clan Destine Press issued a challenge to Australian and Kiwi authors to write cliff-hanging, Australian-flavoured, action-packed adventure stories for two protagonists; stories of the What If, What Now, And Then... kind. This was a catnip call, an irresistible lure, a kid-in-a-candy-store kind of a challenge: what writer wouldn't want to take a crack at that? To make it that little bit more intriguing, the editors decreed the stories could be contemporary, historical, realistic, far-out, spec-fic, horror, SF, or urban fantasy; and, in a spirit of mischief, that at least one of the two protagonists must be human. You'd think that would cover all bases. But writers are a contrary bunch: they pushed these very broad boundaries even further. The result is not one, but two volumes of kick-arse, action-packed stories: And Then... The Great Big Book of Adventure Tales. This is Volume 2: a fascinating collection of genre-bending adventure stories garnered from a mix of sf, fantasy and crime writers, happily encroaching upon each other's territories, and then some.

Video games open portals to fantastical worlds where imaginative play and enchantment prevail. These virtual settings afford us considerable freedom to act out with relative impunity. Or do they? Sound Play explores the aesthetic, ethical, and sociopolitical stakes of people's creative engagements with gaming's audio phenomena-from sonorous violence to synthesized operas, from democratic music-making to vocal sexual harassment. William Cheng shows how video games empower their designers, composers, players, critics, and scholars to tinker (often transgressively) with practices and discourses of music, noise, speech, and silence. Faced with collisions between utopian and alarmist stereotypes of video games, Sound Play synthesizes insights across musicology, sociology, anthropology, communications, literary theory, philosophy, and additional disciplines. With case studies spanning Final Fantasy VI, Silent Hill, Fallout 3, The Lord of the Rings Online, and Team Fortress 2, this book insists that what we do in there-in the safe, sound spaces of games-can ultimately teach us a great deal about who we are and what we value (musically, culturally, humanly) out here. Foreword by Richard Leppert Video Games Live cover image printed with permission from Tommy Tallarico

In the early 1980s, a pharmaceutical company administers an unethical drug trial to residents of the Niger Delta village of Kreektown. When children die as a result of the trial, the dominoes of language extinction and cultural collapse begin to topple. Decades later the end looms for the Menai people. Continents-apart twin brothers separated at birth, an excommunicated daughter living an urbane life with her doctor husband, and an infamous vigilante are among the indelible characters whose lives are shaped by this collective tragedy. Not least of these is the spiritual leader Mata Nimito, who retraces his people’s ancient migration on his quest to preserve the soul of the Menai and resolve the consequences of a centuries-old betrayal. In The Extinction of Menai, Chuma Nwokolo moves across time and continents to deliver a story that speaks to urgent contemporary concerns. He confronts power relations between large corporations and small communities, corporate lobbies and governments, and big pharma and consumers, all expressed through the competing narratives that record the life and death of a civilization.In a novel of stunning scope, Chuma Nwokolo moves across time and place to deliver a story that speaks to urgent contemporary concerns. His characters’ indelible voices offer perspectives that are simultaneously global, political, and intimately human.