The central theme of this study is Artin's braid group and the many ways that the notion of a braid has proved to be important in low-dimensional topology. In Chapter 1 the author is concerned with the concept of a braid as a group of motions of points in a manifold. She studies structural and algebraic properties of the braid groups of two manifolds, and derives systems of defining relations for the braid groups of the plane and sphere. In Chapter 2 she focuses on the connections between the classical braid group and the classical knot problem. After reviewing basic results she proceeds to an exploration of some possible implications of the Garside and Markov theorems. Chapter 3 offers discussion of matrix representations of the free group and of subgroups of the automorphism group of the free group. These ideas come to a focus in the difficult open question of whether Burau's matrix representation of the braid group is faithful. Chapter 4 is a broad view of recent results on the connections between braid groups and mapping class groups of surfaces. Chapter 5 contains a brief discussion of the theory of "plats." Research problems are included in an appendix.

"A new critical edition of Joanna Russ's 1980 feminist novella On Strike Against God, supplemented with additional materials from Russ's archive. An introduction by Russ scholar Alec Pollak opens the edition, essays by contemporary writers Jeanne Thornton and Mary Anne Mohanraj grapple with Russ's enduring influence on feminist authors today, and an interview with Samuel R. Delany reflects on Delany's decades-long correspondence with Russ"--

In 1959, at the age of 22, Joanna Russ published her first science fiction story, “Nor Custom Stale,” in The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy. In the forty-five years since, Russ has continued to write some of the most popular, creative, and important novels and stories in science fiction. She was a central figure, along with contemporaries Ursula K. Le Guin and James Tiptree, in revolutionizing science fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, and her 1970 novel The Female Man is widely regarded as one of the most successful and influential depictions of a feminist utopia in the entire genre. The Country You Have Never Seen gathers Joanna Russ’s most important essays and reviews, revealing the vital part she played over the years in the never-ending conversation among writers and fans about the roles, boundaries, and potential of science fiction. Spanning her entire career, the collection shines a light on Russ’s role in the development of new wave science fiction and feminist science fiction, while at the same time providing fascinating insight into her own development as a writer.

Stories deal with a mysterious child, a daydreamer, a mermaid, fortune telling, obsessive love, women writers, aliens, children and parents

Mia is in Bosnia as a journalist when she is summoned by Asher, the man she blames for her father's death. In his dying moments, Asher returns the dreamcloth to her, a patchwork of beads and lace he stole when she was just a child. The cloth, woven by a seamstress in a grim shtetl in Lithuania, holds the mystery of a forbidden love affair of Mia's grandmother Maya, as she fled the anti-Semitism of Europe in the 1920's. Mia returns to her homeland South Africa, on the eve of the first democratic elections where she grapples to make sense of the injustices, absences and hauntings of her childhood. What happened to her artist father Issey, her nanny Sarafina, and her best friend Grace? The dreamcloth with its 'glimmer of blue silk, a moon of filigree lace and woven cobblestones of amber, ' holds the answers to all that has been lost. Fedler weaves together the present, past and distant past in a stirring epic of family secrets handed down from generation to generation, and ghosts that will not let go of the living.

"My mother, my family and Judaism are nested inside each other. I am Jewish and always Jewish; it's analogous with family, however hard it is, and however strained, it can never be disavowed... I remain, as my therapist put it, 'enmeshed', all tangled up in the family hoard. This book has been both a continuation of my conversations with them, and an attempt to untangle myself.This is Joanne's account of coming to terms with her brother's suicide and through that process, the entirety of her family life. In Small Pieces Joanne explores her childhood, her Jewishness and her mother's death as well as that of her brother.The life and family Joanne describes is a complex combination of conflicting influences - both scientific and literary; Jewish and humanist impulses; and middle America and North London settings. Small Pieces is a beautiful and searingly honest meditation on family and faith."--bookdepository.com.

SPECIAL SHRINKWRAPPED BUNDLE! Whether it happens at the office or at home, out on the town or in the bedroom, life's most f*#!'ed-up situations are covered in the The WTF Book Bundle . The original WTF? gives you humorous ideas for what to do when life makes you say, "what the f*#!?" Step by step, the authors take readers through inventively therapeutic, sometimes illegal, always hilarious solutions to life's many problematic situations. From dealing with workplace politics and romancing coworkers to climbing the success ladder or getting canned, WTF? Work shows you how to handle the daily lows of holding down a j-o-b. It's the one topic that pisses men off yet keeps them coming back for more--women. From hookups to breakups, WTF? Women handles the most f*#!-ed-up scenarios men face with the fairer (and far more confusing) sex.

We all have an erotic code. Your peak erotic experiences and fantasies have coded information about you that can help you understand yourself better. Through this book, you'll see how nonsexual narratives exist in your sexual interests that will help crack your erotic code. You will learn how to have a sex-positive attitude toward your sexual fantasies and minimize any shame you carry about your erotic interests.

Joe Kubert's tale of a wandering young man in the early 1900's finds Abraham Stone caught in the middle of the Mexican Revolution. Abraham becomes an unwilling ally of Pancho Villa. At gunpoint, he is forced to watch the army of Pancho Villa invade New Mexico. Abraham is given a choice: shoot his countrymen or die.

Easy the Hard Way is a full-life story told with gusto, often hilarious, sometimes touching. It will bring a lump to your throat when you least expect it. Joe Pasternak emerges from the pages of his autobiography as an imaginative and resourceful man of tremendous drive and honesty, who is also a warm and deeply human talent. Pasternak's early life reads like the script of an American dream picture: born in a tiny town in Transylvania, son of the shammas at the local synagogue, at seventeen Joe threw off the shackles and made his way to Philadelphia. He knew no English, knew in fact little of anything, but he had sense enough, he writes, to go to New York. The rise of Joe Pasternak was not always in a straight ascending line, but sooner or later it always landed him one rung higher. From Paramount in Jamaica he went to Universal in Hollywood and thence to Europe to supervise Universal's operations abroad before the war. Those were the great days of movie making in Germany and Pasternak played an important part in them. As a producer he is credited with helping such great stars as Deanna Durbin, Judy Garland, Mario Lanza and others to achieve stardom in Hollywood.

"A collection of poems and musings explore the bizarre side of Mother Nature's handiwork, from the depths of the ocean to the wilds of tropical rainforest, to the cozy hearth of the domesticated housecat. The idiosyncratic observations and provocative musings illuminate an unseen world of creatures both real and imagined."--

Guardian of the gates of hell, brightest star in the night sky, the dog is the saucy, swaggering, world-weary trickster whose indomitable spirit has been mythologized for millennia. In Dog, poets Catherine Owen and Joe Rosenblatt have written a volume of solo and conjoined sonnets about dogs of the cosmos, the underworld and the psyche. Orbiting around the striking canine images of photographer Karen Moe's Perros: Dogs of Central Havana, Owen and Rosenblatt wisely and wittily follow the scent of mankind's oldest friend, sniffing out the traces of the dog in all of us.