Post-divorce dating is one more cause for celebration (or a quick call in to the police) in Beth Bosworth's revelatory new book, The Source of Life and Other Stories. The spine of this collection is a series of linked stories about Ruth Stein, a Brooklyn author whose first book has exposed her father's abuses; while the voice here, speaking across a lifetime, ranges from bittersweet to humorous to lethal. In other stories Bosworth's narrators—a mother left to care for her son's suicidal dog, an editor haunted by a dog-eared manuscript—seem to grab hold of the reins and run off with their fates. Meanwhile Bosworth explores the extended family, the bonds of friendship, an apocalyptic Vermont, the rank yet redeemable Gowanus Canal; also rites of passage, race relations, divorce, middle-aged romance, dementia, funerals, alcoholism, and the Jewish religion. Reality is just another stumbling block for Bosworth's characters, who might help themselves but don't always choose to. There are leaps of faith here, nonetheless, as the collection dispenses a kind of narrative psychotropic for survival and redemption, with a chaser of humor mixed in.

Guide, grammar, and phrasebook of Eastern Syriac as spoken by the native populace, written for officers in the British Mandate of Iraq so they could understand the language of the native military forces in the area.

This work contains three dialogues on love, desire, and the love of God, by a Jewish physician and philosopher.

This volume contains Neo-Aramaic texts, with German translation, from various regions between Urmia and Mosul, a collection of 27 narratives (including proverbs and songs) that offer a wealth of cultural information.

In this essay, Lamy discusses the Chronography of east Syriac author Elias of Nisibis (975-1046). Numerous extracts in Syriac and in French translation are included.

Presented here is a complete Hebrew grammar compiled by the learned Venetian rabbi Elijah Levita.

This impressive volume is a collection of inscriptions, mostly Syriac, but also two in Akkadian and some in Aramaic, collected by Pognon during travels in the Middle East. They are accompanied with detailed notes and French translations.

This grammatical study focuses on how the relative particle is used in the Demonstrations of fourth century Syriac author Aphrahat. A great number of examples from Aphrahat’s writings are included in both Syriac and in German translation.

This partial catalogue of one of the greatest Arabic-language collections in the world, housed in what in now the Berlin State Library, describes over 10,000 manuscripts in nine volumes.

Historical syntax has long been neglected in the study of the Semitic languages, although it holds great value for the subgrouping of this diverse language family. Focusing on the development of adverbial subordination, nominal modifiers and direct speech marking, as well as reviewing changes through language contact and drift, this book is the first step in the syntactic reconstruction of the Aramaic dialect group, the longest-attested branch of the Semitic language family.

Winner of the 2011 Cave Canem Poetry Prize “Nicole Terez Dutton’s fierce and formidable debut throbs with restless beauty and a lyrical undercurrent that is both empowered and unpredictable. Every poem is unsettling in that delicious way that changes and challenges the reader. There is nothing here that does not hurtle forward. ” —Patricia Smith Chosen by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association as a 2013 Honor Book Winner for poetry.

This catalog contains detailed descriptions and tables of contents for Turkish manuscripts from the Bibliotheque Nationale; manuscripts are classified by subject.

This paper, reprinted from the Journal Asiatique, provides a handy introduction to the Sogdian alphabet used for Buddhist texts in Central Asia.

This paper examines the construction of masculinity among male members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) and its underlying historical factors.

Takahashi and Weitenberg provide the history and linguistic analysis of Ms. Yale Syriac 9. Only three such Syriac-Armenian lexica are known to survive. The glossary is classified as the Western branch of Modern Armenian, attributed to Dialect Group 5.

Urban sprawl is omnipresent in America and has left many citizens questioning their ability to stop it. In Distant Publics, Jenny Rice examines patterns of public discourse that have evolved in response to development in urban and suburban environments. Centering her study on Austin, Texas, Rice finds a city that has simultaneously celebrated and despised development. Rice outlines three distinct ways that the rhetoric of publics counteracts development: through injury claims, memory claims, and equivalence claims. In injury claims, rhetors frame themselves as victims in a dispute. Memory claims allow rhetors to anchor themselves to an older, deliberative space, rather than to a newly evolving one. Equivalence claims see the benefits on both sides of an issue, and here rhetors effectively become nonactors. Rice provides case studies of development disputes that place the reader in the middle of real-life controversies and evidence her theories of claims-based public rhetorics. She finds that these methods comprise the most common (though not exclusive) vernacular surrounding development and shows how each is often counterproductive to its own goals. Rice further demonstrates that these claims create a particular role or public subjectivity grounded in one’s own feelings, which serves to distance publics from each other and the issues at hand.Rice argues that rhetoricians have a duty to transform current patterns of public development discourse so that all individuals may engage in matters of crisis. She articulates its sustainability as both a goal and future disciplinary challenge of rhetorical studies and offers tools and methodologies toward that end.