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Author : Bohumil Hrabal
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9788024628950
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (289 download)
Download or read book Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp written by Bohumil Hrabal and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Author : Bohumil Hrabal
Publisher : Karolinum Press
ISBN 13 : 8024614472
Total Pages : 189 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (246 download)
Download or read book Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp written by Bohumil Hrabal and published by Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is a novel-interview initiated by the Hungarian journalist, writer and anti-communist activist based in Slovakia László Szigeti. It retains the character of a more or less verbatim oral record - it is full of false starts and thematic and syntactic digressions, characteristic for the majority of Hrabal´s magical, bizarre and grotesque tales. It is unique for being autobiographical and for making the reader understand Hrabal´s personality, his philosophy and perception and understanding of Central Europe shortly before the fall of totalitarian regime in the late 80s.
Author : Derek Sayer
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691239517
Total Pages : 752 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)
Download or read book Postcards from Absurdistan written by Derek Sayer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping history of a twentieth-century Prague torn between fascism, communism, and democracy—with lessons for a world again threatened by dictatorship Postcards from Absurdistan is a cultural and political history of Prague from 1938, when the Nazis destroyed Czechoslovakia’s artistically vibrant liberal democracy, to 1989, when the country’s socialist regime collapsed after more than four decades of communist dictatorship. Derek Sayer shows that Prague’s twentieth century, far from being a story of inexorable progress toward some “end of history,” whether fascist, communist, or democratic, was a tragicomedy of recurring nightmares played out in a land Czech dissidents dubbed Absurdistan. Situated in the eye of the storms that shaped the modern world, Prague holds up an unsettling mirror to the absurdities and dangers of our own times. In a brilliant narrative, Sayer weaves a vivid montage of the lives of individual Praguers—poets and politicians, architects and athletes, journalists and filmmakers, artists, musicians, and comedians—caught up in the crosscurrents of the turbulent half century following the Nazi invasion. This is the territory of the ideologist, the collaborator, the informer, the apparatchik, the dissident, the outsider, the torturer, and the refugee—not to mention the innocent bystander who is always looking the other way and Václav Havel’s greengrocer whose knowing complicity allows the show to go on. Over and over, Prague exposes modernity’s dreamworlds of progress as confections of kitsch. In a time when democracy is once again under global assault, Postcards from Absurdistan is an unforgettable portrait of a city that illuminates the predicaments of the modern world.
Author : Daniel Just
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 100060800X
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (6 download)
Download or read book Transformative Fictions written by Daniel Just and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-07-27 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transformative Fictions: World Literature and Personal Change engages with current debates in world literature over the past twenty years, addressing the nature of literary influence in centers and peripheries, the formation of transnational literary and pedagogical canons, and the role of translation and regionalism in how we relate to texts from around the globe. The author, Daniel Just, argues for a supranational but sub-global perspective of regions that emphasizes practical reasons for reading and focuses on the potential of literary texts to stimulate personal transformation in readers. One of the recurring dilemmas in these debates is the issue of delimitation of world literature. The trouble with the world as a frame of reference is that no single researcher is bound to have the in-depth knowledge and linguistic skills to discuss works from all countries. In response, this book revives literary theory and recasts it for the purposes of world literature, by making a case for the continuing relevance of literature in the age of new media. With the examples of fictional and nonfictional writings by Milan Kundera, Witold Gombrowicz and Bohumil Hrabal, Just shows that regional literatures offer differing methods of activating readers and thereby prompting personal change. This book would be of general interest to anyone who wants to explore personal change through literature but is particularly indispensable for literary professionals, researchers, and postgraduate and graduate students.
Author : Bohumil Hrabal
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 1590175565
Total Pages : 85 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (91 download)
Download or read book Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age written by Bohumil Hrabal and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-04-25 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rake, drunkard, aesthete, gossip, raconteur extraordinaire: the narrator of Bohumil Hrabal’s rambling, rambunctious masterpiece Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is all these and more. Speaking to a group of sunbathing women who remind him of lovers past, this elderly roué tells the story of his life—or at least unburdens himself of a lifetime’s worth of stories. Thus we learn of amatory conquests (and humiliations), of scandals both private and public, of military adventures and domestic feuds, of what things were like “in the days of the monarchy” and how they’ve changed since. As the book tumbles restlessly forward, and the comic tone takes on darker shadings, we realize we are listening to a man talking as much out of desperation as from exuberance. Hrabal, one of the great Czech writers of the twentieth century, as well as an inveterate haunter of Prague’s pubs and football stadiums, developed a unique method which he termed “palavering,” whereby characters gab and soliloquize with abandon. Part drunken boast, part soul-rending confession, part metaphysical poem on the nature of love and time, this astonishing novel (which unfolds in a single monumental sentence) shows why he has earned the admiration of such writers as Milan Kundera, John Banville, and Louise Erdrich.
Author : Hrabal, Bohumil
Publisher : Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press
ISBN 13 : 8024632861
Total Pages : 214 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (246 download)
Download or read book Rambling On written by Hrabal, Bohumil and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2016-05-01 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bohumil Hrabal (1914–97) has been ranked with Jaroslav Hašek, Karel Čapek, and Milan Kundera as among the greatest twentieth-century Czech writers. Hrabal's fiction blends tragedy with humor and explores the anguish of intellectuals and ordinary people alike from a slightly surreal perspective. Rambling On is a collection of stories set in Hrabal's Kersko that depicts the hilariously absurd atmosphere of a tiny cottage community in the heart of a forest in the middle of totalitarian Czechoslovakia. Several of these stories were rejected by the Communist censors during the 1970s; this first English translation features the original, uncensored versions.
Author : Charles D. Sabatos
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1793614881
Total Pages : 205 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (936 download)
Download or read book Frontier Orientalism and the Turkish Image in Central European Literature written by Charles D. Sabatos and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-01-02 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comparative study analyzes the ways that Central European writers used stereotypes of the Turks to develop their national identities from the early modern period to the present. Charles D. Sabatos uses Andre Gingrich’s concept of “frontier Orientalism” to foreground his analysis of Central European Orientalism, designating the nations of the former Habsburg Empire as the occident and the Turks as the oriental “Other.” This study applies theoretical approaches to literary history—as developed by scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt and Linda Hutcheon—to a range of texts from the early modern period, the nineteenth-century national revivals, interwar independence, and the communist and postsocialist regimes. By following these depictions across literatures and over an extensive historical period, this study illustrates how the Turkish stereotype evolved from a menace to a more abstract yet still powerful metaphor of resistance, and finally to a mythical figure that evoked humor as often as fear.
Author : Jiří Pelán
Publisher : Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press
ISBN 13 : 8024639092
Total Pages : 140 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (246 download)
Download or read book Bohumil Hrabal. A Full-length Portrait written by Jiří Pelán and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Described as “one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century,” Bohumil Hrabal ranks among the most important and widely translated Czech authors. Jiří Pelán, a respected scholar of Czech, French and Italian literature, approaches Hrabal as a comparatist, expertly situating him within the context of European and world literature, as he explores the entirety of Hrabal’s oeuvre and its development over sixty years. Praised for its concise, clear and readable style, Bohumil Hrabal: A Full-length Portrait offers international readers an important Czech perspective on the world-class author. Contains 32 photographs of Bohumil Hrabal, a list of his works’ English translations to date, and a bibliography of international scholarship.
Author : Jiří Weil
Publisher : Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press
ISBN 13 : 8024645335
Total Pages : 66 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (246 download)
Download or read book Lamentation for 77,297 Victims written by Jiří Weil and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jiří Weil’s documentary prose poem, Lamentation for 77,297 Victims is a literary monument to the Czech Jews killed during the Holocaust. A remarkable Czech-Jewish writer who worked at Prague’s Jewish Museum during the Nazi Occupation and after – he survived the Holocaust by faking his own death – Weil wrote his Lamentation while he served as the museum’s senior librarian in the 1950s. Remarkable literary experiment opening new ways how to write about the undescribable combines a narrative of the Shoa, newspaper style accounts of individual lives destroyed by the Holocaust, and quotes from the Tanakh, each having a specific and powerful effect.
Author : Jan Zábrana
Publisher : Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press
ISBN 13 : 8024649330
Total Pages : 120 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (246 download)
Download or read book The Lesser Histories written by Jan Zábrana and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2022-06-01 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the eighth floor of a tower block in Central Europe, Jan Zábrana surveyed the twentieth century. He had been exiled from his own life by Communism. His parents were imprisoned, their health broken, and he was not allowed to study languages in college. Refusing both to rebel outright or to cave in, he thought of himself as a dead man walking. “To all those who keep asking me to do things for them, I sometimes feel like saying: ‘But I’m dead. I died long ago. Why do you keep treating me as if I were one of the living?’” Yet during some of Europe’s most difficult years, he wrote The Lesser Histories, a collection of sixty-four sonnets that range through themes of age, sex, and political repression—a radiant testament to his times. The lines are emptied both of personal pathos and political stridency. Often Zábrana’s own voice segues into those of poets he had translated over the years, leaving only a bare shimmer of subjectivity—humorous, oblique, pained—with which to view his own works and days. The poems document a splendid and bitter isolation, and are immersed in the humor, hatreds, and loves of the everyday. Published in Czech in the ill-fated year of 1968, they subsequently fell into neglect. After the fall of Communism in 1989, Zábrana’s collected poems and selected diaries were published in Czech, and he was acclaimed as a major twentieth-century writer. Now, with this collection, he can begin to reach English-language readers for the first time.
Author : Martin Machovec
Publisher : Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press
ISBN 13 : 8024641259
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (246 download)
Download or read book Writing Underground written by Martin Machovec and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Výbor ze studií literárního historika a editora Martina Machovce, které vznikaly v posledních dvou dekádách (2000–2018), představuje celou řadu faset uvažování o fenoménu undergroundu. V jednotlivých studiích se zabývá zejména undergroundovou literaturou z okruhu I. M. Jirouse a rockové skupiny The Plastic People of the Universe, ale věnuje pozornost i širším souvislostem této literatury – jejím předchůdcům z 50. let (okruh Egona Bondyho a Ivo Vodseďálka), roli ve společenství Charty 77, vazbám na angloamerické prostředí nebo hudebním a scénickým realizacím a způsobu, jakým byly tyto texty v samizdatu šířeny. In this collection of writings produced between 2000 and 2018, the pioneering literary historian of the Czech underground, Martin Machovec, examines the multifarious nature of the underground phenomenon. After devoting considerable attention to the circle surrounding the band The Plastic People of the Universe and their manager, the poet Ivan M. Jirous, Machovec turns outward to examine the broader concept of the underground, comparing the Czech incarnation not only with the movements of its Central and Eastern European neighbors, but also with those in the world at large. In one essay, he reflects on the so-called Půlnoc Editions, which published illegal texts in the darkest days of the late forties and early fifties. In other essays, Machovec examines the relationship between illegal texts published at home (samizdat) and those smuggled out to be published abroad (tamizdat), as well as the range of literature that can be classified as samizdat, drawing attention to movements frequently overlooked by literary critics. In his final, previously unpublished essay, Machovec examines Jirous’s “Report on the Third Czech Musical Revival” not as a merely historical document, but as literature itself.
Author : Libuše Moníková
Publisher : Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press
ISBN 13 : 8024651726
Total Pages : 129 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (246 download)
Download or read book Transfigured Night written by Libuše Moníková and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2023-05-01 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leonora Marty, who fled Czechoslovakia decades earlier, has returned after the Velvet Revolution. Having concluded her ballet of The Makropulos Affair, the Czech choreographer wanders through Prague, meets old classmates, and visits obscure museums. Leonora is a cultural encyclopedia, so every encounter leads to reflections on the city, Czechoslovakia, and the world. When Leonora meets a descendant of Germans driven from Czechoslovakia after World War Two, she must confront her relationship with the city of her youth, her homeland’s relationship with its past, and this new relationship with her German admirer. Written in German and published in 1995, by an author whose life mirrored her protagonist’s, the novel employs a style as influenced by the operas of Leoš Janáček as the novels of Thomas Pynchon. “A multilayered novel which takes us on a journey through the myths of Prague and the collective narratives of Czech-German conflict.” –Lucy Duggan, author of Tendrils and Tiny Stories “In Moníková’s novel, the alchemist laboratories of Prague’s Golden Lane open out onto imaginary landscapes: from the Valley of Wild Šárka, where female dissent was quashed during the mythological Maidens’ War, to the Valley of the Queens, where the mummified Pharaoh Hatshepsut survives undead.” –Ulrike Vedder, professor of German literature at Humboldt University of Berlin
Author : Dyk, Viktor
Publisher : Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press
ISBN 13 : 8024634406
Total Pages : 122 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (246 download)
Download or read book The Pied Piper written by Dyk, Viktor and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2018-04-01 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Básník, prozaik, dramatik a publicista Viktor Dyk se v této novele (časopisecky 1911–1912, knižně 1915) inspiroval starou saskou pověstí, již použil jako volný rámec pro vyprávění o tajemném poutníkovi, který na žádost občanů očistí svou píšťalou hanzovní město Hammeln od krys, avšak rozčarován malodušností konšelů a zrazen v lásce, zneužije píšťaly a odvede za trest celé město do zkázy. Protipólem postavy krysaře, osudově formovaného hrdiny, osamělého a neklidného snivce ztělesňujícího svět buřičů, je v knize rybář Sepp Jörgen, jenž se s realitou smiřuje a záchranou kojence dá vyrůst nové naději. Dyk v této novele, jež odráží novoklasicistní směřování jeho pozdní tvorby, tak dokázal využít staré předlohy k vytvoření svrchovaného prozaického díla o konfliktu iluze a skutečnosti. Jeho tajuplná atmosféra předznamenává pozdější baladickou prózu 30. let.
Author : Hašek, Jaroslav
Publisher : Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press
ISBN 13 : 802463287X
Total Pages : 110 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (246 download)
Download or read book Behind the Lines written by Hašek, Jaroslav and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2016-08-01 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collection of short stories entitled Behind the Lines: Bulguma and Other Stories draws on Hašek’s experience from revolutionary Russia. In a manner similar to that employed in his caricatures of the pre-war monarchy, he satirically captures events of the Bolshevik revolution from the perspective of a Red commissar in a combination of grotesque humor and sarcasm. Historical events serve merely as part of the historical mystification. Hašek presents them as he perceived them as a man and participant in historical events. He depicts them primarily as simple and human, pushing his critical view into the background. On the border of a comic exaggeration and a realistic depiction, an amusing story about a forgotten Tartar town of Bugulma unfolds featuring the Soviet commander of the Tver Revolutionary Regiment, drunk Yerokhimov, and Comrade Gašek, the Commanding Officer of Bugulma. Employing humor and exaggeration, Hašek demonstrates the zealotry of the revolutionary period as well as the stupidity and simple human insecurity of authoritarians. The collection of short stories, Behind the Lines, also includes other sketches by Hašek, written at the same time.
Author : Peter Orner
Publisher : Catapult
ISBN 13 : 1936787253
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (367 download)
Download or read book Am I Alone Here? written by Peter Orner and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2016-10-25 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This National Book Critics Circle Award is “an entrancing attempt to catch what falls between: the irreducibly personal, messy, even embarrassing ways reading and living bleed into each other, which neither literary criticism nor autobiography ever quite acknowledges" (The New York Times). “Stories, both my own and those I’ve taken to heart, make up whoever it is that I’ve become,” Peter Orner writes in this collection of essays about reading, writing, and living. Orner reads and writes everywhere he finds himself: a hospital cafeteria, a coffee shop in Albania, or a crowded bus in Haiti. The result is a book of unlearned meditations that stumbles into memoir. Among the many writers Orner addresses are Isaac Babel and Zora Neale Hurston, both of whom told their truths and were silenced; Franz Kafka, who professed loneliness but craved connection; Robert Walser, who spent the last twenty-three years of his life in a Swiss insane asylum, working at being crazy; and Juan Rulfo, who practiced the difficult art of silence. Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, Yasunari Kawabata, Saul Bellow, Mavis Gallant, John Edgar Wideman, William Trevor, and Václav Havel make appearances, as well as the poet Herbert Morris--about whom almost nothing is known. An elegy for an eccentric late father, and the end of a marriage, Am I Alone Here? is also a celebration of the possibility of renewal. At once personal and panoramic, this book will inspire readers to return to the essential stories of their own lives.
Author : Brian K. Goodman
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674292944
Total Pages : 363 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (742 download)
Download or read book The Nonconformists written by Brian K. Goodman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-20 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How risky encounters between American and Czech writers behind the Iron Curtain shaped the art and politics of the Cold War and helped define an era of dissent. “In some indescribable way, we are each other’s continuation,” Arthur Miller wrote of the imprisoned Czech playwright Václav Havel. After a Soviet-led invasion ended the Prague Spring, many US-based writers experienced a similar shock of solidarity. Brian Goodman examines the surprising and consequential connections between American and Czech literary cultures during the Cold War—connections that influenced art and politics on both sides of the Iron Curtain. American writers had long been attracted to Prague, a city they associated with the spectral figure of Franz Kafka. Goodman reconstructs the Czech journeys of Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, and John Updike, as well as their friendships with nonconformists like Havel, Josef Škvorecký, Ivan Klíma, and Milan Kundera. Czechoslovakia, meanwhile, was home to a literary counterculture shaped by years of engagement with American sources, from Moby-Dick and the Beats to Dixieland jazz and rock ’n’ roll. Czechs eagerly followed cultural trends in the United States, creatively appropriating works by authors like Langston Hughes and Ernest Hemingway, sometimes at considerable risk to themselves. The Nonconformists tells the story of a group of writers who crossed boundaries of language and politics, rearranging them in the process. The transnational circulation of literature played an important role in the formation of new subcultures and reading publics, reshaping political imaginations and transforming the city of Kafka into a global capital of dissent. From the postwar dream of a “Czechoslovak road to socialism” to the neoconservative embrace of Eastern bloc dissidence on the eve of the Velvet Revolution, history was changed by a collision of literary cultures.
Author : Steven Moore
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1441133364
Total Pages : 705 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (411 download)
Download or read book The Novel: An Alternative History written by Steven Moore and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Encyclopedic in scope and heroically audacious, The Novel: An Alternative History is the first attempt in over a century to tell the complete story of our most popular literary form. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the novel did not originate in 18th-century England, nor even with Don Quixote, but is coeval with civilization itself. After a pugnacious introduction, in which Moore defends innovative, demanding novelists against their conservative critics, the book relaxes into a world tour of the pre-modern novel, beginning in ancient Egypt and ending in 16th-century China, with many exotic ports-of-call: Greek romances; Roman satires; medieval Sanskrit novels narrated by parrots; Byzantine erotic thrillers; 5000-page Arabian adventure novels; Icelandic sagas; delicate Persian novels in verse; Japanese war stories; even Mayan graphic novels. Throughout, Moore celebrates the innovators in fiction, tracing a continuum between these pre-modern experimentalists and their postmodern progeny. Irreverent, iconoclastic, informative, entertaining-The Novel: An Alternative History is a landmark in literary criticism that will encourage readers to rethink the novel.
