To save a world, he must risk his own. While testing fireworks, orphan Sam shoots down a dragon and her knight. A dying emperor begs his wife, Maria, to abdicate and avoid the ensuing power struggle for their failing empire. With her mind bound to the human who shot her out of the sky, Eliana upsets her father’s plans for returning their people to their home world. Rifts, invisible gates between worlds and a source of magical energy, connect the fates of Sam, Maria and Eliana. Sam’s destiny is to seal the Rifts. Unbeknown to Maria, her dead son and heir to the empire, Sam, still lives. And if the Rifts close, Eliana and her people can’t return home. Set in a world where animals host human souls, machines weave magic and people aren’t who they claim to be, Rifts is the first book in a three-part epic fantasy series.

In Of Lodz and Love, Chava Rosenfarb revisits her themes of the the shtetl and pre-Holocaust Poland, of economic and political oppression, and of the upheavals that would herald a new Jewish national and political awakening. The story takes Yacov, son of Hindele, and Binele, the daughter of the chalk vendor Yossele Abedale, to the industrial town of Lodz during the first years of Poland's independence, both before and after the country entered the war with the Bolsheviks. The would-be young lovers evolve separately against the backdrop of the city's own struggle for economic survival. In sometimes tragic turns, they make their way in the strange urban culture, rapidly acquiring the skills to survive. Translated from the original Yiddish, this book serves as prologue and as counterpoint to the urbanization of Jewish life in Poland. In its elegance and subtle wit, and overwhelming human dignity, it is not only the testimony of a vanished world, but a powerful love story.

Gender Through the Prism of Difference adopts a global, transnational perspective on how race, class, and sexual diversity are central to the study of sex and gender. In contrast with other books in this area--which tend to focus on U.S. or European viewpoints--this wide-ranging anthology features many articles based on research done elsewhere throughout the world. Now in its fifth edition, the book opens with a revised and updated Introduction that sets the stage for understanding gender as a socially constructed experience. Featuring twenty-eight new readings, this edition covers compelling subjects like transgendered people, intersex issues, men and masculinity, sexual and gender violence, disabilities, obesity, reproductive technologies, educational testing, aging and ageism, and Occupy Wall Street.

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