In a fast-paced blend of adventure, humor, and poignant insights, Ed Kaufman's linked memoir and travel essays sweep the reader along to coveted destinations on five continents.

The pieces fit together like a fine mosaic, capturing the physical and emotional colors of the moment. At times the author and his wife, Karen, and their young son Adam face danger, whether in the midst of a herd of thirsty elephants in Zimbabwe, or the time Ed falls into crocodile-infested waters in Costa Rica. Then the mood changes: the three travel to Thailand for a family wedding-turned-reunion, and later on have a rare chance to participate in ancient rituals in Ethiopia, Tibet, and Papua New Guinea.

The thread connecting these thirty-three pieces dates back to a turning point in Kaufman's youth before he became a father. Since then, travel has become a key to a deeper understanding of himself, his multitalented wife, and their courageous young son.

The author brings his dual credentials as psychiatrist and writer with a MFA in creative nonfiction to this hard-to-put down collection. Both as an inner and an outer journey, From Monks to Mountain Gorillas is a sequential trip of a lifetime when all roads lead back to family and home.

Following the invisible thread of connection between people who are seemingly intended to become family, journalist Jennifer Grant shares the deeply personal, often humorous story of adopting a fifteen-month-old girl from Guatemala when she was already the mother of three very young children.

Her family's journey is captured in stories that will encourage not only adoptive families but those who are curious about adoption or whose lives have been indirectly touched by it. Love You More explores universal themes such as parenthood, marriage, miscarriage, infertility, connection, destiny, true self, failure and stumbling, and redemption.

Award-winning religion columnist and author Cathleen Falsani has high praise for Love You More: "From page one of her courageously vulnerable, intoxicatingly funny memoir about faith and family, it is clear that Jennifer Grant listens to her life with great care."

Jennifer Grant is a journalist and freelance writer with particular interests in parenting, family life, and international health and development. She has been a columnist and currently freelances for the Chicago Tribune. Jennifer is a guest blogger for websites including Fullfill and a regular contributor to Christianity Today's her.meneutics blog for women. Her work has been published on britannica.com and in magazines including Chicago Parent, Christianity Today, Draft, and Conscious Choice. For more than a decade, she wrote features, restaurant profiles, and columns for Sun-Times Media newspapers. 

It's been one year since the car accident that killed her boyfriend left her scarred and shaken. Flanked by an eccentric posse of friends, she is serving out a self-imposed sentence at a halfway house, while trying to finish cosmetology school. Amid the rampant diagnoses, over-medication, compulsive eating, and acrylic nails of Los Angeles, Bebe looks for something to believe in before something -- her past, the dangerously magnetic men in her life, her own bad choices -- knocks her off course again.

Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight, has high praise for the book:"Pretty is the not-so-pretty, utterly riveting, non-stop frantic and compulsively readable saga of Bebe Baker, a heroine who knows her way around a serious binge. The prose, at times, drives with such ferocious urgency that the words seem not so much written as willed onto the page. Pretty stands out as a triumph of survival testimony."

Jillian has an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Flaunt Magazine, Opium Magazine, Society, Pale House: A Collective and in the anthology My First Time: A Collection of First Punk Show Stories. Her New York Times bestselling memoir, Some Girls: My Life in a Harem, was translated into fourteen different languages.

She has read at spoken word events across the country and has been interviewed on such television programs as The View, Good Morning America and Howard Stern. She was a featured dancer with the infamous Velvet Hammer Burlesque. She is married to musician Scott Shriner. They live in Los Angeles with their son.