A playwright searches the theater for a crazed saboteur Sylvia Markey sits in her dressing room, holding her cat’s head in her hands. Just the head—the body is nowhere to be found. This gruesome act of violence was committed just a few minutes before curtain, and Sylvia has no time to grieve. She collects herself, and gets ready to perform. She makes it halfway through the second act before her nerves get the best of her, and she vomits onstage. As the run continues, so does the sabotage, and the unknown troublemaker attacks actors, vandalizes the set, and hurls acid at one of the designers. To playwright Abigail James, the meaning is clear: Someone is trying to murder her play. The police do all they can, but it will take someone who understands theater to unravel the mystery. This is a matter of revenge—and Abigail will settle it backstage.

“Walter Jon Williams is a visionary of tremendous power and originality . . . He kills every damn time.” --Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Dagmar Shaw is back in Hollywood, with a plan to lasso a series of emerging technologies into a revolutionary new form of entertainment. Sean Makin is a washed-up child actor clinging to life on reality television, until Dagmar offers him the chance to be a star. Sean’s past, however, holds the darkest of secrets, and now it looks as if that secret threatens to break loose in a new cycle of violence and murder. Sean’s determined to succeed, even if the path to stardom is splashed with blood. But the ultimate secret is Dagmar’s, and Sean has to decide how much to pay in order to find out what’s on the other side of the fourth wall. “ . . . the blending of mystery-thriller, SF, and traditional Hollywood-story elements is hugely successful. It’s one of those ambitious, genre-bending books in which you keep seeing, as you read, ways the story could fall apart under its own weight—but it never does. Surely the best of the Dagmar Shaw series and one of the author’s finest novels.” --Booklist (starred review) “This is an ambitious novel, blending elements of science fiction, thriller and Hollywood epic into one wildly inventive narrative. It’s the kind of genre-bender that you can spend a lot of time trying to describe, or you can simply say: go read it, right now.” --David Pitt, Winnipeg Free Press

This Holiday special Fourth Wall is brought to you by The WHNC with their utmost thanks for the support given to them throughout the years. Have a Happy Holiday season.

Metagames: Games about Games scrutinizes how various meta devices, such as breaking the fourth wall and unreliable narrator, change and adapt when translated into the uniquely interactive medium of digital games. Through its theoretical analyses and case studies, the book shows how metafictional experimentation can be used to both challenge and push the boundaries of what a game is and what a player’s role is in play, and to raise more profound topics such as those describing experiences of people of oppressed identities. The book is divided into six chapters that deal with the following meta devices: breaking the fourth wall, hypermediation, unreliable narrator, abusive game design, fragmentation, and parody. The book will predominantly interest scholars and students of media studies and game studies as it continues discourses held in the discipline regarding the metareferential character of digital games.

Discover Your Voice and Enthrall Readers! The craft of writing is filled with various debates: Should I include a prologue? Should I delete all adverbs from my manuscript? Just how much backstory--if any--can I include in my story? These questions--and their often-contradictory answers--can cause confusion, frustration, and even paralysis in the writer. The Irresistible Novel frees you from the limits of so-called "rules" and instead provides you with a singular goal: You must engage your readers from beginning to end. Filled with down-to-earth discussions on the various debates of writing, as well as innovative research on neuroscience and reader response, this book shows you how to: • Navigate the various debates on writing fiction--showing versus telling, purple prose, outlining, writing description, and more--to decide what kind of novelist you want to be. • Hack your reader's brain to hook her interest and trigger emotional engagement from the very first page. • Incorporate enduring elements of storytelling from masters like Joseph Campbell, Aristotle, and Carl Jung. Readers want to be swept away by your stories. When you eschew the rules and focus on your readers' desires, you're free to write truly irresistible fiction.

“A delectable stew of fantasy, horror, hard science fiction, and alternate history in 27 sumptuous stories and one powerful novella. . . . Stunning” (Publishers Weekly). Space opera. Superheroes. Horror and fairy tales. What if there was a multi-genre story collection available from a Nebula-award winning author? Eric James Stone’s immersive collection, The Humans in the Walls, contains twenty-seven tales of science fiction and fantasy, ranging from hard science fiction to fairy-tale fantasy, from humor to horror. Within these pages you’ll find supernatural beings, uploaded brains, psychic powers, space colonies, alternate timelines, aliens, superheroes, and giant AI starships that pay little attention to The Humans in the Walls. Each story contains special commentary by the author.

One dimensional television characters are a thing of the past--today's popular shows feature intricate storylines and well developed characters. From the brooding Damon Salvatore in The Vampire Diaries to the tough-minded Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead, protagonists are not categorically good, antagonists often have relatable good sides, and heroes may act as antiheroes from one episode to the next. This collection of new essays examines the complex characters in Orange Is the New Black, Homeland, Key & Peele, Oz, Empire, Breaking Bad, House, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

This book brings the emerging fields of practical theology and theology of the arts into a dialogue beyond the bias of modern systematic and constructive theology. The authors draw upon postmodern, post-secular, feminist, liberation, and dialogical/dialectical philosophy and theology, and their critiques of the narrow modern emphases on reason and the scientific method, as the model for all knowledge. Such a practical theology of the arts focuses the work of theology on the actual practices that engage the arts in their various forms as the means of interpreting and understanding the nature of the communities and their members, as well as the mechanisms through which these communities engage in transformative work, to make persons and neighborhoods whole. This book presents its theological claims through the careful analysis of several stories of communities around the world that have engaged in transformational practices through a specific art form, investigating communities from Europe, the Middle East, South America, and the U.S. The case studies explored include Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Druze, indigenous, and sometimes agnostic subjects, involved in visual art, music, dance, theatre, documentary film, and literature. Theology and the Arts demonstrates that the challenges of a postmodern and post-secular context require a fundamental rethinking of theology that focuses on discrete practices of faithful communities, rather than one-dimensional theories about religion.

Alison Siewert and her team of writers offer ideas for every aspect of drama ministry—from why it?s biblical to how to direct a performance, from warm-ups for actors to how to write your own sketches. Includes 14 sketches you can reproduce in your ministry.

This complete companion to the study of drama, theatre and performance studies is an essential reference point for students undertaking or preparing to undertake a course either at university or at drama school. Designed as a single reference resource, it introduces the main components of the subject, the key theories and thinkers, as well as vital study skills. Written by a highly regarded academic and practitioner with a wealth of expertise and experience in teaching, Mangan takes students from studio to stage, from lecture theatre to workshop, covering practice as well as theory and history. Reliable and comprehensive, this guide is invaluable throughout a degree or course at various levels. It is essential reading for undergraduate students of Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at universities, drama schools and conservatoires, as well as AS and A Level students studying Drama and Theatre who are considering studying the subject at degree level.