Drawing on fieldwork that spans nearly twenty years, Making Do in Damascus offers a rare portrayal of ordinary family life in Damascus, Syria. It explores how women draw on cultural ideals around gender, re­ligion and family to negotiate a sense of collective and personal identity. Emphasizing the ability of women to creatively manage family relation­ships within mostly conservative Sunni Muslim households, Gallagher highlights how personal and material resources shape women's choices and constraints around education, choice of marriage partner, decisions about employment, childrearing, relationships with kin, and the uses and risks of new information technologies. Gallagher argues that taking a nuanced approach toward analyz­ing women’s identity and authority in society, allows us to think beyond dichotomies of Damascene women as either oppressed by class and patriarchy on one hand, or completely autonomous agents of their own lives on the other. Tracing ordinary women’s experiences and ideals across decades of social and economic change Making Do in Damas­cus highlights the salience of collective identity, place, and connection within families, as well as resources and regional politics, in shaping a generation of families in Damascus.

A boy finds himself alone with his first love in a toboggan stalled atop the Matterhorn at Disneyland. A woman, bitter about her marriage to a man turned blind, must decide if he lives or dies. A man haunted by his role in creating the H-bomb suddenly disappears in old age, only to turn up at Alamagordo, seeking an Indian and redemption. Such characters, at the crossroads of emotion and ethics, confounding loss and resurrection, populate this unforgettable collection of tales. Loosely connected, the stories chronicle the lives of the Matters, a captivating, tragic, yet ultimately exultant Arab American family. Spanning continents and a century, the stories center on the balm that human relationships offer. In "The Chandelier," a boy desperate to feed his starving family hauls a stolen chandelier over a snowy mountain in Lebanon during World War I. A young Mexican nurse and her lover wind their way through eighteenth-century California missions in "Fabiola." Against the backdrop of the September 11 attacks, an Arab American man is thrown from a bus, echoing past racial discriminations, in "Get Off the Bus."

Set during the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the ensuing Iran-Iraq War of 1980–1988, the novel Martyrdom Street chronicles the lives of three Iranian women, Fatemeh, Nasrin, and Yasaman. These ordinary women tell their intimate stories of love, loss, betrayal, and hope in intertwining narratives that unfurl simultaneously in America and Iran. Kashani-Sabet’s characters endure both the familiar struggles of family relationships and searing political upheavals. A mother and daughter come to terms with the burdens of separation imposed by politics and exile. A young woman grapples with the haunting memories of an assassination. The poignant confessions of these skillfully wrought characters give voice to the travails of two generations of Iranians and Iranian Americans.

Through a series of close readings of twenty contemporary Arabic novels, Aghacy presents a mosaic of masculinities that challenges the generally held view of an essentialized archetypal Arab man and mirrors a contested vision of manliness where men figure in diverse sociocultural environments. This groundbreaking work reveals the volatile nature of masculinity and its inextricability from femininity.

Despite the ease with which scholars have used the term "memory" in recent decades, its definition remains enigmatic. Does cultural memory rely on the memories of individuals, or does it take shape beyond the borders of the individual mind? Cultural memory has garnered particular attention within Irish studies. With its trauma-filled history and sizable global diaspora, Ireland presents an ideal subject for work in this vein. What do stereotypes of Irish memory—as extensive, unforgiving, begrudging, but also blank on particular, usually traumatic, subjects—reveal about the ways in which cultural remembrance works in contemporary Irish culture and in Irish diasporic culture? How do icons of Irishness—from the harp to the cottage, from the Celtic cross to a figure like James Joyce—function in cultural memory? This collection seeks to address these questions as it maps a landscape of cultural memory in Ireland through theoretical, historical, literary, and cultural explorations by top scholars in the field of Irish studies. In a series that will ultimately include four volumes, the sixteen essays in this first volume explore remembrance and forgetting throughout history, from early modern Ireland to contemporary multicultural Ireland. Among the many subjects addressed: Guy Beiner disentangles "collective" from "folk" memory in "Remembering and Forgetting the Irish Rebellion of 1798," and Anne Dolan looks at local memory of the civil war in "Embodying the Memory of War and Civil War." The volume concludes with Alan Titley’s "The Great Forgetting," a compelling argument for viewing modern Irish culture as an artifact of the Europeanization of Ireland and for bringing into focus the urgent need for further, wide-ranging Irishlanguage scholarship.

In the second volume of a series that will ultimately include four, the authors consider Irish diasporic memory and memory practices. While the Irish diaspora has become the subject of a wide range of scholar­ship, there has been little work focused on its relationship to memory. The first half of the volume asks how diasporic memory functions in dif­ferent places and times, and what forms it takes on. As an island nation with a history of emigration, Ireland has developed a rich diasporic cultural memory, one that draws on multiple traditions and his­toriographies of both “home” and “away.” Native traditions are not imported wholesale, but instead develop their own curious hybridity, reflecting the nature of emigrant memory that absorbs new ways of thinking about home. How do immigrants remember their homeland? How do descendants of immigrants “remem­ber” a land they rarely visit? How does diasporic memory pass through families, and how is it represented in cultural forms such as literature, festivals, and souvenirs? In its second half, this volume shifts its attention to the concept of “memory practices,” ways of cultural remembering that result from and are shaped by particular cultural forms. Many of these cultural forms embody memory materially through language, music, and photography and, because of their distinc­tive expressions of culture, give rise to distinctive memory practices. Gath­ering the leading voices in Irish studies, this volume opens new pathways into the body of Irish cultural memory, demonstrating time and again the ways in which memory is supported by the negotiations of individuals within wider cultural contexts.

Banned and beloved in equal measure, The Midnight Court is a canonical eighteenth-century text widely considered to be one of the greatest comic Irish poems. Despite its simple storyline, Merriman’s poem addresses a wide range of themes from its satirical treatment of sexuality to its biting social commentary. This volume, the first critical edition, offers readers a fluid translation and five essays that contextualize the poem, making it an ideal text for any student of the poem and eighteenth-century Irish literature.

In Militant Women of a Fragile Nation, Malek Abisaab takes a gendered approach to labor conflicts, anticolonial struggles, and citizenship in modern Lebanon. The author traces the conditions and experiences of women workers at the French Tobacco Monopoly.

A Millennium of Turkish Literature tells the story of how literature evolved and grew in stature on the Turkish mainland over the course of a thousand years. The book features numerous poems and extracts, most in fluid translations by Halman. This volume provides a concise, but captivating, introduction to Turkish literature and, with selections from its extensive "Further Reading" section, serves as an invaluable guide to Turkish literature for course adoption.

In 1961, Beat writer Seymour Krim set Greenwich Village on its ear with a slim volume of essays that featured an unleashed voice, a brash title, and a foreword by Norman Mailer. James Baldwin called Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer an "extraordinary volume." Saul Bellow published an excerpt in his journal The Noble Savage, and Mailer saluted Krim’s jazzy prose with its "shifts and shatterings of mood." Despite such praise and critical attention, Krim’s work is excluded from most Beat anthologies and is little known outside literary circles. With Missing a Beat, a collection of eighteen essays by Krim published between 1957 and 1989, Cohen introduces this influential writer to a new generation. In the Village Voice, New York Magazine, New York Times, and elsewhere, Krim pioneered a new style of subjective and personal reporting to write about the postwar American scene from a Jewish angle. Aggressively unacademic, Krim’s journalism displays the "rapid, nervous, breathless tempo" that Irving Howe called a hallmark of Jewish literature. Krim outlived his early literary fame, but he produced an impressive body of work and was a tremendous prose stylist. Missing a Beat resurrects an American original, finding Krim a new literary home among such celebrated writers as Norman Mailer, David Mamet, and Saul Bellow.