These two volumes present a thorough sampling of Syriac literature from various time periods, including some lesser-known authors and some works published nowhere else. The text is presented in vocalized east Syriac script.

Maronite bishop Yusuf Daryan’s (d. 1920) detailed and lengthy work covers Syriac orthography and morphology, discussed with numerous vocalized examples, which are also generally translated into Arabic.

Enslaved by their own fears, the characters in this riveting collection are straining for redemption. Their choices reflect the well-worn patterns we carve for ourselves through our idiosyncrasies-our dominant traits. A basketball coach teaches moral ambiguity; a divorcee clutches at sanity; a mother struggles with her son's paternity; a childless man regrets his youthful onanism. Through their shared experiences these tangible characters undergo the sad, hilarious search for wholeness and security. Set in the stark isolated landscape of Southern Alberta, Eric Freeze's debut collection is a deftly-crafted study of desperate mortals careening through their liminal moments, grasping for certainty. "An honest record, a way to trace the passage of time and understand the little stories of our past" - Boston Review "Freeze Builds his sentences with the intricate grace of the snowflakes so often falling from the sky in these stories, all of them peculiarly sad and funny and beautiful." - Ben Percy "The fiction in Dominant Traits seems grounded in the quirkiness that is the everyday, that is where we learn about the human heart and its odd acts of defiance, generosity, courage, ineptitude." - Darrell Spencer "Excellent stories... Freeze produces realistic, believable people and delves deeply into their psyches to create truly enjoyable character studies." - Booklist

This detailed grammar of Syriac by the Maronite George Al-Ruzzi (Risius), written in Arabic, covers poetic meters in addition to the customary grammatical subjects.

For most of literary history, personal confessions about illness were considered too intimate to share publicly. By the mid-twentieth century, however, a series of events set the stage for the emergence of the illness narrative. The increase of chronic disease, the transformation of medicine into big business, the womenÆs health movement, the AIDS/HIV pandemic, the advent of inexpensive paperbacks, and the rise of self-publishing all contributed to the proliferation of narratives about encounters with medicine and mortality. While the illness narrative is now a staple of the publishing industry, the genre itself has posed a problem for literary studies. What is the role of criticism in relation to personal accounts of suffering? Can these narratives be judged on aesthetic grounds? Are they a collective expression of the lost intimacy of the patient-doctor relationship? Is their function thus instrumental—to elicit the readerÆs empathy? To answer these questions, Ann Jurecic turns to major works on pain and suffering by Susan Sontag, Elaine Scarry, and Eve Sedgwick and reads these alongside illness narratives by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Reynolds Price, and Anne Fadiman, among others. In the process, she defines the subgenres of risk and pain narratives and explores a range of critical responses guided, alternately, by narrative empathy, the hermeneutics of suspicion, and the practice of reparative reading. Illness as Narrative seeks to draw wider attention to this form of life writing and to argue for new approaches to both literary criticism and teaching narrative. Jurecic calls for a practice thatÆs both compassionate and critical. She asks that we consider why writers compose stories of illness, how readers receive them, and how both use these narratives to make meaning of human fragility and mortality.

Voted one of the five best poetry collections for 2012 by Publishers Weekly, Animal Eye employs pastoral motifs to engage a discourse on life and love, as Coal Hill Review states "It is as if a scientist is at work in the basement of the museum of natural history, building a diorama of an entire ecosystem via words. She seem snot only interested in using the natural world as a metaphoric lens in her poems but is set on building them item by item into natural worlds themselves."

Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century is an exciting sequel to its predecessors in the American Poets in the 21st Century series. Like the earlier anthologies, this volume includes generous selections of poetry by some of the best poets of our time as well as illuminating poetics statements and incisive essays on their work. This unique organization makes these books invaluable teaching tools. Broadening the lens through which we look at contemporary poetry, this new volume extends its geographical net by including Caribbean and Canadian poets. Representing three generations of women writers, among the insightful pieces included in this volume are essays by Karla Kelsey on Mary Jo Bang's modes of artifice, Christine Hume on Carla Harryman's kinds of listening, Dawn Lundy Martin on M. NourbeSe Phillip (for whom "english / is a foreign anguish"), and Sina Queyras on Lisa Robertson's confoundingly beautiful surfaces. A companion web site will present audio of each poet's work.

To Know Her Own History chronicles the evolution of writing programs at a landmark Southern womenÆs college during the postwar period. Kelly Ritter finds that despite its conservative Southern culture and vocational roots, the WomanÆs College of the University of North Carolina was a unique setting where advanced writing programs and creativity flourished long before these trends emerged nationally. Ritter profiles the history of the WomanÆs College, first as a normal school, where women trained as teachers with an emphasis on composition and analytical writing, then as a liberal arts college. She compares the burgeoning writing program here to those of the Seven Sisters (Wellesley, Smith, Radcliffe, Barnard, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and Mount Holyoke) and to elite all-male universities, to show the singular progressivism of the WomanÆs College. Ritter presents lively student writing samples from the early postwar period to reveal a blurring of the boundaries between \u201ccreative\u201d and \u201cexpository\u201d styles. By midcentury, a quantum shift toward creative writing changed administratorsÆ valuation of composition courses and staff at the WomanÆs College. An intensive process of curricular revisions, modeled after HarvardÆs \u201cRedbook\u201d plan, was proposed and rejected in 1951, as the college stood by its unique curricula and singular values. Ritter follows the plight of individual instructors of creative writing and composition, showing how their compensation and standing were made disproportionate by the shifting position of expository writing in relation to creative writing. Despite this unsettled period, the WomanÆs College continued to gain in stature, and by 1964 it became a prize acquisition of the University of North Carolina system. RitterÆs study demonstrates the value of local histories to uncover undocumented advancements in writing education, offering insights into the political, cultural, and social conditions that influenced learning and methodologies at \u201cmarginalized\u201d schools such as the WomanÆs College.

Inspired by a voracious curiosity about humans and other subjects, the poems in Heather Christle's What Is Amazing describe and invent worlds in an attempt to understand through participation. The book draws upon the wisdom of foolishness and the logic of glee, while simultaneously exploring the suffering inherent to embodied consciousness. Speakers play out moments of bravado and fear, love and mortality, disappointment and desire. They socialize incorrigibly with lakes, lovers, fire, and readers, reasoning their way to unreasonable conclusions. These poems try to understand how it is that we come to recognize and differentiate objects and beings, how wholly each is attached to its name, and which space reveals them. What Is Amazing delights in fully inhabiting its varied forms and voices, singing worlds that often coincide with our own.

In this early reading book for Aramaic (that is, not Syriac), J.J. Marcel provides a few texts from the Bible together with an Aramaic-Latin glossary.

In this lengthy essay on the subject of Syriac meter, Martin begins by reviewing the previous scholarship on the subject and then edits the section on meter from Jacob bar Shakko’s Book of Dialogues, with annotated French translation.

This collection of texts in the Neo-Aramaic dialect of Urmia, with parallel German translation and vocabulary notes, includes stories, material on baptism, a wedding, Araq and wine, history of the region, and several letters or parts thereof.

This article describes the historical development of Armenian translations of Syriac literature from the 5th century, Intervening- and Clinician Periods. Significant works and figures are highlighted.

This study of the mid-6th century Chronicle of Edessa explores its sources, date of composition, and doctrinal stance.

When asked to describe her short stories, Edith Pearlman replied that they are stories about people in peculiar circumstances aching to Do The Right Thing. She elaborated with the same wit and intimacy that make her stories a delight to read:\u201cBefore I was a writer I was a reader; and reading remains a necessary activity, occupying several joyous hours of every day. I like novels, essays, and biographies; but most of all I like the short story: narrative at its most confiding. \u201cMy own work, and particularly the stories in Vaquita, aims at a similar intimacy between writer and reader. My imagined reader wants to know who loves whom, who drinks what, and, mostly, who answers to what summons. Thank Heavens for Spike Lee! Before his movies writers and critics had to natter about moral stances; now I can say with a more tripping tongue that my characters are people in peculiar circumstances, aching to Do The Right Thing if only they can figure out what The Right Thing is. If not, they’ll at least Do Their Own Right Thing Right.\u201cAnd I’m drawn to heat: sweltering Central American cities; a steamy soup kitchen; Jerusalem in midsummer; the rekindled passion of an old historian; the steady fire of terminal pain. I like solitaires, oddities, charlatans, and children. My characters are secretive; in almost every story somebody harbors a hidden love, dread, regret, or the memory of an insult awaiting revenge.\u201cWhen I stop writing stories I plan to write letters, short and then shorter. My mother could put three sentences onto a postcard and make the recipient think he’d read a novel. I’m working towards a similar compression.\u201d