Bob Hicok's poems are often edgy, brazen, and funny. They’re just as likely to be soulful, reflective, and provocative. Usually at the same time. As Hicok builds toward the punchline of a poem set up with his characteristic wit, he zigs into seriousness. A thoughtful meditation that builds to a moment of epiphany zags into comedy. Hicok's fluid ability to shift moods, the richness of his visual palette, and his idiosyncratic use of language fill the pages of Insomnia Diary. The fourth collection of poetry from this former automotive die designer delivers more of the cunning brilliance that has become Hicok's hallmark.

An important new collection of original essays that examine how Ellison's landmark novel, Invisible Man (1952), addresses the social, cultural, political, economic, and racial contradictions of America. Commenting on the significance of Mark Twain's writings, Ralph Ellison wrote that "a novel could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation's vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal." Ellison believed it was the contradiction between America's "noble ideals and the actualities of our conduct" that inspired the most profound literature -- "the American novel at its best. "Drawing from the fields of literature, politics, law, and history, the contributors make visible the political and ethical terms of Invisible Man, while also illuminating Ellison's understanding of democracy and art. Ellison hoped that his novel, by providing a tragicomic look at American ideals and mores, would make better citizens of his readers. The contributors also explain Ellison's distinctive views on the political tasks and responsibilities of the novelist, an especially relevant topic as contemporary writers continue to confront the American incongruity between democratic faith and practice. Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope uniquely demonstrates why Invisible Man stands as a premier literary meditation on American democracy.

Paul Celan s widely recognized as the greatest and most studied post-war European poet. At once demanding and highly rewarding, his poetry dominates the field in the aftermath of the Holocaust. This selection of poems, now available in paper for the first time, is comprised of previously untranslated work, opening facets of Celan's oeuvre never before available to readers of English. These translations, called "perfect in language, music, and spirit" by Yehuda Amichai, work from the implied premise of what has been called Intention auf die Sprache, delivering the spirit of Celan's work-his dense multilingual resonances, his brutal broken music, syntactic ruptures and dizzying wordplay.

A national bestseller when first published in 1901, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch endures today as one of the most memorable literary creations by a Kentucky author. This immensely popular novel spawned several movies (with such stars as W. C. Fields and Shirley Temple), countless stage productions, radio shows, and even dolls.Alice Hegan Rice spins the memorable tale of a family struggling against all odds in the Cabbage Patch, an old Louisville slum "where ramshackle cottages played hop-scotch over the railroad tracks." This hopeful story follows the Wiggs as they face eviction from their dilapidated house and take in two orphanage fugitives. Out of print for many years, this charming, funny chronicle of hope triumphing over despair is finally available to a new generation of readers.

An anthology of texts of Hispano-Arabic poems of exceptionally high literary quality and cultural significance. The texts are accompanied by literal translations and explanatory notes for the use of students of Arabic and Romance literatures.

The work of Louis Zukofsky has been gaining exposure as a new generation of poets and scholars "rediscover" the American avant-garde tradition. Concurrently, interest in Guillaume Apollinaire's work has grown in recent years as English departments re-explore international modernism. In this extended essay, one of the American literary giants of the 20th Century provides deep readings of the French modernist's entire oeuvre and provides insight into his own formative aesthetic. Two sections of the essay were published in Westminster Magazine in 1932; the complete book is available here for the first time in English. The book builds its arguments with extensive quotations from Apollinaire's poems in their orignal French; this bilingual edition is the latest offering in what Publisher's Weekly has hailed as "an essential series."

This booklet presents the Syriac alphabet according to the West Syriac script, known also as Serto. With twenty-two illustrations, it is a great introduction to the alphabet for children, parents, and students of Syriac.

Rae Armantrout's most recent collection of poems focuses on the phenomenon of time, both as lived experience at the start of the 21st century and as a stubborn mystery confronting physicists and philosophers. The poems in this book are polyphonic: they juxtapose the discourses of science and religion, Hollywood and the occasional psychotic stranger. The title poem, which appears in Best American Poetry 2002, leads off with a "sphinx" asking "Does a road / run its whole length / at once? / Does a creature / curve to meet / itself?" Armantrout's work, with its careful syntax bordering on plain speech and meticulously scored short lines, is always struggling with the problem of consciousness, its blindspots and double-binds. The poems whirl like shifting and scattered pieces of the present moment. They attempt to "make sense" of our lives while acknowledging the depth of our self-deception and deception.

The excavations at the Chimes Shopping Centre, have given archaeologists the opportunity to trace the development of the Medieval town of Uxbridge. The central part of the town was set out during the 12th century, perhaps as a planned extension of an existing Saxon hamlet. The borough ditch, which marked the boundary of the town, follows the line of George Street. Just inside this, the discovery of a pottery kiln, producing South Hertfordshire greyware shows that Uxbridge was a centre for pottery production throughout the 12th and 13th centuries. Medieval expansion south along the High Street can be identified, along with periods of prosperity and recession. Evidence of industrial processes, particularly tanning, date from the 17th century onwards, and can be associated with denser occupation along the High Street. By the early 19th century the entire street frontage was built up.

Often compared with Apollinaire as the first and liveliest avant-garde poet in his language, Vicente Huidobro was a one-man movement ("Creationism") in the modernist swirl of Paris and Barcelona between the two World Wars. His masterpiece was the 1931 book-length epic Altazor, a Machine Age paean to flight that sends its hero (Altazor, the "antipoet") hurtling through Einsteinian space at light speed. Perhaps the fastest-reading long poem of the century, and certainly the wildest, Altazor rushes through the universe in a lyrical babble of bird-languages, rose-languages, puns, neologisms, and pages of identical rhymes, finally ending in the pure sound of the language of the future. Universally considered untranslatable until the appearance of Eliot Weinberger's celebrated version in 1988, Altazor appears again in an extensively revised translation with an expanded introduction.

This is a catalogue of Syriac and Karshuni manuscripts purchased by the British Museum by W. Budge in 1889 and 1890 at Mosul, Alkosh, and the Tiari district. This is the sequal to Wright's Catalogue of the Syriac manuscripts in the British Meuseum, also available from Gorgias Press.

De Pretis’s book focuses on the epistolary features of Horace’s First Book of Epistles, reading them from points of view related to the epistolary form: the weight of the addressee; the dialogue between literary genres; the poet's self-representation; temporality; and the power of the author. These issues also pertain to literature as such, since all literature can be regarded, to a certain degree, as "epistolary." But the extent and consistency with which the Epistles explore epistolary aspects, can only be explained in terms of their generic affiliation.

A detailed grammar, with extensive vocabulary, of the Neo-Aramaic dialect as spoken in Urmia, by a missionary of the American Board in Persia.

The only detailed study of the diacritical and vocalization system of Syriac. Segal examines the history and usage of the diacritical point, from before the seventh century, up to the thirteenth century, taking into account both the East and West Syriac traditions.

This book examines the religious epistemologies of Søren Kierkegaard, John Henry Newman, and William James in the light of contemporary challenges to religious faith. They defended the right of persons to embrace religious beliefs that are not strictly warranted by empirical evidence and logical argumentation. Faith must not be hampered, they argued, by the demands of reason narrowly conceived. Paul Sands notes, however, important differences in the way each relates faith to reason. Sands examines the religious epistemologies of Kierkegaard, Newman, and James in the context of two "givens" characteristic of early twenty-first century culture, namely, the intellectual hegemony of probabilism and the pluralization of the Western mind.

The first complete edition, containing 727 "laughable stories", by Bar-Hebraeus. It was the child of the compiler's old age, and says much for the broadmindedness and versatility of the learned Bar-Hebraeus.