This October, three new books from Syracuse University Press explore the lives of Syrian refugees, Palestinian marriage practices, and the mushrooms of the Empire State.
While humanitarian organizations and media outlets often reduce Syrian refugees to statistics or brief anecdotes, the real story of displacement unfolds in the intimate spaces of family life. Through the interwoven narratives of five middle-aged sisters from Damascus, Lines of Flight, Assemblages of Home, by Leila Hudson, reveals how Syrian women navigate war, exile, and the profound transformation of their families and identities. Drawing on extensive interviews conducted between 2015 and 2017, this book follows an extended Sunni Muslim family as they flee their homes in Damascus’s Eastern Ghouta suburbs and scatter across Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, and eventually Europe. As these women move through an increasingly hostile landscape of border controls, refugee camps, and human trafficking networks, they must reinvent themselves—from stable middle-class mothers to resourceful survivors, from guardians of tradition to architects of change. Their journeys challenge conventional assumptions about refugee experiences, revealing how displacement reconfigures family networks, religious practices, and gender roles.
In Crafting Marriages: Palestinian American Women Transforming Gender Boundaries, Enaya Othman draws on three decades of ethnographic research to chart how Palestinian women have reimagined and reshaped marriage practices across generations. Through careful analysis of over sixty personal narratives, family documents, and marriage videos, Othman reveals how these women have become key agents of cultural change, negotiating between traditional expectations and contemporary possibilities. Her research highlights the complexity of Palestinian American marriages, shaped by the dynamic interplay of religious identity, cultural heritage, and modern American life. Othman’s groundbreaking study shows how the rise of global Islamic revival movements since the 1970s have created new opportunities for Palestinian women to challenge traditional marriage customs. By emphasizing Islamic values over ethnic ties, younger generations are expanding the boundaries of acceptable marriage partners across racial, cultural, and national lines, reshaping the meaning of marriage in diaspora. Crafting Marriages provides valuable insights into how Palestinian American women navigate the balance between tradition and transformation, contributing to broader discussions on gender, agency, and cultural change in transnational contexts.
For amateur mycologists and foragers alike, the difference between a beautiful fungal find and a potentially toxic mushroom can be difficult to distinguish. Updated and expanded nearly twenty years after its original publication, Common Edible and Poisonous Mushrooms of New York, Second Edition is ideally suited to help readers of any experience level make quick and easy distinctions between edible species and the poisonous and unpalatable wild mushrooms of the region. Filled with photos and useful descriptions, this book provides key identifying features, spore characteristics, and a color key. The new edition adds more than thirty species not found in the previous volume, as well as updated terminology, making it the definitive guide to edible mushrooms in New York.