Bound By Silver

Riley is one of the best dancers at Silver Shoes. Does this mean she will be a great teacher too? Riley has sprained her ankle and is forced to take a break from dancing! Sitting at home on the couch is at odds with Riley's energetic nature, so she excitedly takes up Miss Caroline's offer to become her personal assistant at Silver Shoes. But will Riley get carried away with her new-found authority and end up hurting her friends? And will her impatience to return to dancing and master the lyrical exam routine make her injury even worse?

Sheriff Guy Trident doesn't have much to do with off-worlders; he has his hands full keeping his own planet safe. But he'll do anything, go anywhere to save Jewel Quinn. She broke his heart years ago when she left to marry a Terraloft aristocrat. Now she's run away from her husband, only to fall into the clutches of slavers. Posing as a wealthy playboy, Guy arrives at Zuthuru Station to learn he's too late: Jewel's memories have been erased. She's been tipped in silver, a process that leaves nothing behind except her body, sexually bound to pleasuring her master. Unwilling to give up hope, Guy buys her. Jewel fights to reclaim herself, recalling a different connection to the handsome sheriff, remembering the frightened eyes of a young boy and the events that made her run. Together she and Guy search for her cure, plan her son's rescue from her ruthless ex, and test if they have any kind of future...before the past catches up to them. 70,000 words

UK Colloids 2011 - the first multi-day conference on the topic of colloid science held in the UK for many years, jointly organized by the RSC Colloid and Interface Science Group and the SCI Colloid and Surface Science Group. The conference had over 250 delegates, from all across the world – good representation from Japan, China, Australia, USA, France, Germany, Holland, Sweden, Spain, Poland, Georgia – as well as a substantial number of UK based researchers. This Special Issue of “Progress in Colloid and Polymer Science” collects together a selection of 20 papers, mostly presented during the Conference. The papers included cover the wide variety of topics from fundamentals in colloid and interface science to industrial applications. The current Special Issue also reflects the international character of the Conference.

The Age of Silver advances a "horizontal" method of comparative literature and applies this approach to analyze the multiple emergences of early realism and novelistic modernity in Eastern and Western cultural spheres from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Naming this era of economic globalization the Age of Silver, Ning Ma emphasizes the bullion flow from South America and Japan to China through international commerce, and argues that the resultant transcontinental monetary and commercial co-evolutions stimulated analogous socioeconomic shifts and emergent novelistic realisms. The main texts addressed within include The Plum in the Golden Vase (China), Don Quixote (Spain), The Life of an Amorous Man (Japan), and Robinson Crusoe (England). These Eastern and Western narratives indicate from their own geographical vantage points commercial expansions' stimulation of social mobility and larger processes of cultural destabilization. Their realist tendencies are underlain with politically critical functions and connote "heteroglossic" national imaginaries. This horizontal argument realigns novelistic modernity with a multipolar global context and reestablishes commensurabilities between Eastern and Western literary histories. The Age of Silver challenges the unilateral equation between globalization and modernity with westernization, and foregrounds a polycentric mode of global early modernity for pluralizing the genealogy of world literature and historical transcultural relations.