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Pawel Huelle imagines the adventures of Hans Castorp from Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.
The history of Poland in the last century through the history of a car
A student pedals an old Ukraina bicycle between striking factories, delivering bulletins, in the tumultuous first days of the Solidarity movement... A shepherd watches, unseen, as a strange figure disembarks from a pirate ship anchored in the cove below, to bury a chest on the beach that later proves empty... A prisoner in a Berber dungeon recounts his life s story the failed pursuit of the world s very first language by scrawling in the sand on his cell floor... The characters in Pawel Huelle's mesmerising stories find themselves, willingly or not, at the heart of epic narratives; legends and histories that stretch far beyond the limits of their own lives. Against the backdrop of the Baltic...
A collection of "intensely lyrical" stories set in postwar Poland. Mingling the miraculous and the mundane, these poignantly beautiful stories are quiet but powerful journeys of the spirit. Translated by Michael Kandel. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book. Harvest in Translation series
A slighted wife escapes her wealthy family for the evening and stumbles into the city's red-light district... The head of security at Barcelona's container port searches for a figure that only he has seen sneak in... An elderly woman brings home a machine that will turn her body into atoms, so she can leave behind a city that is no longer recognisable... Historically, Barcelona is a city of resistance and independence; a focal point for Catalan identity, as well as the capital of Spanish republicanism. Nestled between the Mediterranean coast and mountains, this burgeoning city has also been home to some of the greatest names in modern art and architecture, and attracts visitors and migrants from all over the world. As a result, the city is a melting-pot of cultures, and the stories gathered here offer a miscellany of form and genre, fittingly reminiscent of one of Gaudi's mosaics. From the boy-giant outgrowing his cramped flat on the city's outskirts, to the love affair that begins in a launderette, we meet characters who are reclaiming the independence of their city by challenging common misconceptions and telling its myriad truths.
We know Stanislaw Lem, whether or not we consciously know that we do. He may only be recognised in the West as the author of the twice-filmed novel, Solaris, but the influence of his other work is legion. From computer games (The Sims was inspired by one of his short stories), to films (the red and blue pills of The Matrix owe much to his Futurological Congress); from the space comedies of Red Dwarf to the metaphysical satires of Douglas Adams... the presence of this masterly Polish writer can be traced far and wide. Nor was his genius confined to fiction. Lem's essays and pseudo-essays borne out of the military industrial tensions of the Cold War have outlived their original context and spe...
This collection of essays aims to recapitulate the state of grotesque poetics in modern and post-modern writing. It concentrates on Central and Eastern Europe, introducing the Western reader to the variety and ingenuity of this region’s literary traditions, ranging from German and Russian to Lithuanian and Romanian literatures. At the same time, it seeks to highlight the importance of the grotesque mode of writing in the region. It includes new insights and interpretations of theories on grotesque and Menippean satire including (but not limited to) the works of Mikhail Bakhtin. The historic scope of the volume ranges from the legacies of Nazi dictatorship and exile to the post-communist ti...
Essays looking at heritage practices and the construction of the past, along with how they can be used to build a national identity. The preservation of architectural monuments has played a key role in the formation of national identities from the nineteenth century to the present. The task of maintaining the collective memories and ideas of a shared heritage often focused on the historic built environment as the most visible sign of a link with the past. The meaning of such monuments and sites has, however, often been the subject of keen dispute: whose heritage is being commemorated, by whom and for whom? The answers to such questions are not always straightforward, particularly in Central ...
Borderland: On Reviving Culture is a most timely book that tells the story of a project for our times. It is the story of the Borderland organization, which consists of two dovetailing initiatives, an international NGO, the Borderland Foundation, and the more locally and nationally focused Borderland Centre of Arts, Culture and Nations. Borderland is based in the far northeastern corner of Poland close to the borders of Russia, Lithuania and Belarus, where it has devised an array of programs and initiatives designed to promote harmonious cultural plurality in a region of inter-ethnic and religious tensions that date back centuries. Ian Watson, Director of the Theatre Program, Director of the Urban Civic Initiative, Department of Arts, Culture and Media, Rutgers University-Newark
This volume stems from the assumption that broadly-understood borderlands, as well as peripheries, provinces or uttermost ends of different kinds, are abodes of significant culture-generating forces. From the academic point of view, their undeniable appeal lies in the fact that they constitute spaces of mutual interactions and enable new cultural phenomena to surface, grow or decline, and, as such, are worth thorough and constant scrutiny. However, they also provide the setting for radical clashes between ideologies, languages, religions, customs, and, as the media report every single day, armies or guerrilla units. Living within such areas of creative dynamics and destructive friction (or v...