Yielding Ice About to Melt awakens the reader to new, hidden, and forgotten perceptions. Using a prose that is pure yet intense, Richard Penna creates an enigmatic world that is at once in and yet out of our time, nudging our memory of ancient truths and shaking us into awareness of new beginnings. Thomas, a young doctor, has crossed a vast and heavily polluted river in order to live in a sparsely populated area on the edge of an impenetrable forest. An icy winter freezes the land and the river. He has found work as a factotum in a remote house inhabited entirely by women. Each woman, in her particular way, holds Thomas in thrall. He is bound to them all and his feelings for them range between a passionate, unexpressed love and a profound hatred. His refusal to accept their real and symbolic significance in his life leads him further into a state of alienation and impotent rage. A crisis occurs, a disappearance, and a death. Thomas realizes he must yield, "like ice about to melt," to the guidance of the women-emotionally, psychologically, sexually-but how is he to do this? How can he shed his own alien guise to find a vital part of his new being? "A credible, entertaining, feminist psychological allegory narrated by a male protagonist? No easy task, but first novelist Penna's economical yet poetic prose makes it look deceptively simple." - Library Journal

In Kenneth Mackay's 1895 admonitory tale, Britain's attention and military forces are diverted by a Russian attack on India, and Australia is left defenseless. The Russians lead the invasion force, but for readers of the Victorian Age, the real horror is the use of Chinese troops. This sweeping speculative story foreshadows the rapid growth of nationalism in the 20th Century. It also takes remarkable risks with its subject matter and its audience, challenging both literary and moral conventions. The Wesleyan edition-the first version of the book published in over a hundred years-includes facsimile illustrations from the original text, a new introduction and thorough notations. Peopled with extraordinary characters, swiftly plotted, and thrillingly romantic, this influential classic fantasy is as fascinating today as it was more than a century ago.

Dedicated to a man who has devoted his life to the study of the Greek language and its literature. Professor Jerker Blomqvist began his academic career as a PhD at Lund University 1969, and since then has been brightening up the lives of his students, colleagues and friends. He has been a popular and committed teacher who, aside from his lecturing, has also written books in subjects covering everything from Greek grammar to commentaries on classical texts. Even if his most important publications have dealt with linguistics and textual criticism, these works nevertheless contain traces of other fields that have interested him. The articles in For Particular Reasons mirror the widely different areas of interest of the guest of honour. Here are texts dealing with medicine, Latin hymnography, Greek grammar, exegetics and problems in translation.

Zither & Autobiography is comprised of two parts: the author's autobiography and a book-length poem entitled "Zither." Both parts of the book are concerned with facts and their undoing. In Autobiography, Scalapino explores her shifting memories of childhood-especially of years spent in Asia-experimenting with the memoir form to explore how a view of one's own life develops, how "fixed memories move as illusion. " Zither opens with a unique narrative that the author describes as "samurai film as Classic Comic of Shakespeare's King Lear (without using any of Shakespeare's language, characters or plot)." Creating a complex spatial soundscape, the poem works formally to allow continual change of one's conceptions while reading. The juxtaposition of the two parts and the connection between them is "the anarchist moment...disjunction itself," a key concept in much of Scalapino's work. This vivid book reveals in every thought-sparking section just why Scalapino has been hailed by Library Journal as "one of the most unique and powerful writers at the forefront of American literature."

Fierce and sensual, the poems in Outlandish Blues merge everyday speech with a shimmering lyricism and burst from the page into song. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers sees the blues, what she terms the "shared 'blue notes,''' as an important intersection between the secular and the divine, and between the various African American vernacular traditions, from spirituals to jazz. Part Nina Simone, part Bessie Smith, her poems are filled with a sweaty honesty, moving from the personal to the collective experience. This movement is often accomplished through the use of personae, concentrated here in a stunning series of poems on the Biblical figures of Hagar and Sarah. Whether about a contemporary domestic scene, a slave ship, or Aretha Franklin, these are poems that speak to the soul of experience.

More than any other writer, Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) is responsible for raising detective stories from the level of pulp fiction to literature. Chandler's hard-boiled private eye Philip Marlowe set the standard for rough, brooding heroes who managed to maintain a strong sense of moral conviction despite a cruel and indifferent world.Chandler's seven novels, including The Big Sleep (1939) and The Long Goodbye (1953), with their pessimism and grim realism, had a direct influence on the emergence of film noir. Chandler worked to give his crime novels the flavor of his adopted city, Los Angeles, which was still something of a frontier town, rife with corruption and lawlessness. In addition to novels, Chandler wrote short stories and penned the screenplays for several films, including Double Indemnity (1944) and Strangers on a Train (1951). His work with Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock on these projects was fraught with the difficulties of collaboration between established directors and an author who disliked having to edit his writing on demand.Creatures of Darkness is the first major biocritical study of Chandler in twenty years. Gene Phillips explores Chandler's unpublished script for Lady in the Lake, examines the process of adaptation of the novel Strangers on a Train, discusses the merits of the unproduced screenplay for Playback, and compares Howard Hawks's director's cut of The Big Sleep with the version shown in theaters. Through interviews he conducted with Wilder, Hitchcock, Hawks, and Edward Dmytryk over the past several decades, Phillips provides deeper insight into Chandler's sometimes difficult personality.Chandler's wisecracking Marlowe has spawned a thousand imitations. Creatures of Darkness lucidly explains the author's dramatic impact on both the literary and cinematic worlds, demonstrating the immeasurable debt that both detective fiction and the neo-noir films of today owe to Chandler's stark vision.

Sin puertas visibles is a fully bilingual anthology that features emerging women poets whose work provides a taste of the adventurous new spirit infusing Mexican literature. All eleven poets represented have had at least one book published in Mexico, yet none of their work has been translated into English until now.Featuring the work of: Cristina Rivera-Garza, Carla Faesler, Ang\u00e9lica Tornero, Ana Bel\u00e9n L\u00f3pez, Silvia Eugenia Castillero, M\u00f3nica Nepote, Dana Gelinas, Mar\u00eda Rivera, Ofelia P\u00e9rez Sep\u00falveda, Dorantes, and Laura Sol\u00f3zano. Mexico poesses one of Latin America's most important poetic traditions, but its depth and range are virtually unknown to readers north of the border. Reflecting the diversity and complexity f contemporary mexican poetry, the poems presented here are by turns meditative and explosive, sensuous and inventive, ironic and tender--in short, they are subversive, provocative, and bold.

The poems in The Starry Messenger explore the many facets of Galileo Galilei's life and times--his troubled childhood, his appetites and love affairs, his early scientific discoveries, his famed exploration of the heavens, his house arrest, his blindness. Emphasizing Galileo's independent nature and his affection for his mistress and daughter, George Keithley provides one of the most personal portraits of the astronomer ever written. In the process, he depicts the sensuous world of religion, magic, and science that was seventheenth-century Florence, Padua, Venice, Ostia, and Rome.

Long for This World features the best of Ronald Wallace's work from his previous collections of poetry--Plums, Stones, Kisses & Hooks , Tunes for Bears to Dance To, People and Dog in the Sun, The Makings of Happiness, Time's Fancy and The Uses of Adversity--along with a generous selection of twenty-six new poems. If Wallace's recent poems sometimes seem darker and deeper, more meditative and complex, less sanguine about the tragedies of daily life, they never sacrifice the comic sense, the synthesis of technical skill and strong emotion, and the sensory immediacy that have become his hallmarks.

One of the main sources from which the famous Bar Hebraeus might have drawn his knowledge of Syriac grammar to write his semhe. This book is not only important for the history of Syriac grammars, but can be used to learn grammar itself.

The main Neo-Aramaic-English dictionary for the dialects spoken by the "Eastern Syrians [Assyrians & Chaldeans]", including illustrations from the dialects of the Jews of Zakhu and Azerbaijan, and of the Western Syrians of Tur Abdin and Ma'lula.

The primary grammatical reference for the Neo-Aramaic dialects "spoken by the Eastern Syrians [modern Assyrians & Chaldeans] of Kurdistan, North-West Persia, and the Plain of Mosul," includes notices of the dialects of the Jews of Azerbaijan & Zakhu.

A mixed-media tour de force, Alphabet Theater breaks open the page to extend poetic practice into the realms of visual art and performance. Its complex and innovative format layers poetry, video stills, drawing and collages in pieces that range from performance art to opera and political theater. The book's four distinctive sections encompass four separate performances. In "The Poor Body," first performed in collaboration with choreographer Elizabeth Lahey, the text alternates with video stills of movement. "The Lightning Hive" is a "semiotic opera" swarming with letters and bees in motion, accompanied by staging notes and drawings. The performance space "The Still Place" is the page itself, exploring the fragile border between the "I" and the "not-I." Finally, "Read My Apocalypse," is a performance that tracks the months preceding the Gulf War in a kind of desperate vaudeville with material and references ranging from Milton and apocalypse psychology to Pat Robertson, Love Canal and W.C. Williams. This book is a thoroughly engaging transit through the landscapes of contemporary culture and relationships.

Song of Thieves delves into issues of racial identity and politics, the immigrant experience, and the search for "home" and family histories. In this follow-up to her award-winning debut collection, The Water Between Us, Shara McCallum artfully draws from the language and imagery of her Caribbean background to play a haunting and soulful tune.

The Drue Heinz Literature Prize was established in 1980 to encourage and support the writing and reading of short fiction. Over the past twenty years judges such as Robert Penn Warren, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Alice McDermott, and Frank Conroy have selected the best collections from the hundreds submitted annually by up-and-coming writers.20 represents the best of the best—one story from each of the prize-winning volumes. Chosen by acclaimed author John Edgar Wideman, the selections cover a broad range of inventive and original characters, settings, and emotions, charting the evolution of the short story over the past two decades. One of the most prestigious awards of its kind, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize has helped launch the careers of a score of previously "undiscovered" writers, many of whom have gone on to great critical success. Past Winners of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize: David Bosworth, Robley Wilson, Jonathan Penner, Randall Silvis, W. D. Wetherell, Rick DeMarinis, Ellen Hunnicutt, Reginald McKnight, Maya Sonenberg, Rick Hillis, Elizabeth Graver, Jane McCafferty, Stewart O’Nan, Jennifer Cornell, Geoffrey Becker, Edith Pearlman, Katherine Vaz, Barbara Croft, Lucy Honig, Adria Bernardi.

Kentucky and Kentuckians are full of stories, which may be why so many present-day writers have Kentucky roots. Whether they left and returned, like Wendell Berry and Bobbie Ann Mason, or adopted Kentucky as home, like James Still and Jim Wayne Miller, or grew up and left for good, like Michael Dorris and Barbara Kingsolver, they have one connection: Kentucky has influenced their writing and their lives. L. Elisabeth Beattie explores this influence in twenty intimate interviews.Conversations with Kentucky Writers was more than three years in the making, as Beattie traveled across the state and beyond to capture oral histories on tape. Her exhaustive knowledge of these authors helped her draw out personal revelations about their work, their lives, and the nature of writing. When Still concludes his interview with "I believe I've told you more than anybody," he could be speaking for any of Beattie's subjects.Aspiring writers will learn that Mason submitted twenty stories to the New Yorker before one was accepted, and that Still wrote articles for Sunday school magazines. There's plenty of advice: Dorris tells budding authors to get real jobs, keep journals, and read everything, even cereal boxes, and Marsha Norman reminds playwrights that "it is not the business of the theater to provide writers with a living." Kingsolver advises, "Read good stuff and write bad stuff until eventually what you're writing begins to approximate what you're reading."Beattie's collection includes striking self-portraits of such writers as Sue Grafton, Leon Driskell, James Baker Hall, Fenton Johnson, George Ella Lyon, Taylor McCafferty, Ed McClanahan, Sena Naslund, Chris Offutt, Lee Pennington, and Betty Layman Receveur.What most distinguishes these moving conversations from other author interviews is their focus on creativity, on the teaching of writing, and on the authors' strong sense of place.As Wade Hall writes in his foreword, all twenty writers recognize that their works have been significantly influenced by their "Kentucky experience." This collection offers insights into Kentucky's rich and flowering literary heritage.