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"Zanna Sloniowska writes beautifully; with empathy, sensitivity, and with real political impact . . . an important new voice in Polish literature" OLGA TOKARCZUK, Nobel Prize-winning author of Flights "Remarkable, a gripping, Lvivian evocation of a city and a family across a long and painful century . . . A novel of life and survival across the ages" PHILIPPE SANDS, author of East West Street Amid the turbulence of 20th century Lviv, meet four generations of women from the same fractious family, living beneath one roof and each striving to find their way across the decades of upheaval in an ever-shifting city. First there is Great-Granma, tiny and terrifying, shaped by a life of exile, hards...
The day begins like any other Saturday for beautiful Parisian restaurateur Aurélie Bredin, until she wakes up to find her apartment empty - her boyfriend gone off with another woman. Heartbroken, Aurelie walks the streets of Paris in the rain, finally seeking refuge in a little bookshop in the Ile St. Louis, where she's drawn to a novel titled The Smiles of Women by obscure English author Robert Miller. She buys it and takes it home, but when she begins to read she's astonished: The Smiles of Women can't possibly be about her restaurant ... about her. Except, it is. Flattered and curious to know more, Aurélie knows she must get in touch with the reclusive Mr Miller, but it proves to be a daunting task. His French publishers seem determined to keep his identity secret, and while the Editor-in-Chief André Chabanais is happy to give Aurelie his time, he seems mysteriously unwilling to help her find her author. Is Robert Miller really so shy, or is there something that André isn't telling Aurélie?
Hen's memoir about growing up in a middle-class Jewish family in Warsaw during the 1920's and 30's through the first few months of the German occupation.
Some time in the 1970s, Konstantin Alpheyev, a well-known Russian musicologist, finds himself in trouble with the KGB, the Russian secret police, after the death of his girlfriend, for which one of their officers may have been responsible. He has to flee from the city and to go into hiding. He rents an old house located on the bank of a big Russian river, and lives there like a recluse observing nature and working on his new book about Wagner. The house, a part of an old barge, undergoes strange metamorphoses rebuilding itself as a medieval schooner, and Alpheyev begins to identify himself with the Flying Dutchman. Meanwhile, the police locate his new whereabouts and put him under surveillance. A chain of strange events in the nearby village makes the police officer contact the KGB, and the latter figure out who the new tenant of the old house actually is.
With this novel, Andreï Makine, whose work has been compared to that of Balzac, Chekhov, Pasternak, and Proust, brings to a stunning conclusion his epic trilogy that began with Dreams of My Russian Summers and continued with Requiem for a Lost Empire. The novel opens in 1942, in a burning, gutted Stalingrad, where the German and Russian armies are locked in a struggle to the death. Amid these ruins, a French pilot and a nurse, also French, are engaged in a passionate affair that each knows will be hopelessly brief. The pilot, Jacques Dorme, was shot down two years earlier. Imprisoned and sent east to a German POW camp, Dorme made a daring escape and crossed Germany stealthily by night until...
Ferocious and irreverent, this multiple prize-winning novel burns down the pretensions of a pompous literary establishment and takes no prisoners.
In High Albania, Victorian anthropologist and travel writer M (Mary) Edith Durham presents a vivid and fascinating insight into the culture, customs, people, and the lands of Northern Albania as it was in the early 20th century.
The history of Poland in the last century through the history of a car
Philosophy, Society and the Cunning of History in Eastern Europe charts the intellectual landscape of twentieth century East-Central Europe under the unifying theme of 'precariousness' as a mode of historical existence. Caught between empires, often marked by catastrophic historic events and grand political failures, the countries of East-Central Europe have for a long time developed a certain intellectual self-representation, a culture that not only helps them make some sense of such misfortunes, but also protects them somehow from a collapse into nihilism. An interdisciplinary study of this sophisticated culture of survival and endurance has been long overdue. Not only is it charming and w...
1989/90 markiert den Beginn einer neuen politischen, geschichtlichen und gesellschaftlichen Ära in Europa. Je nach geopolitischem Blickwinkel wird dieser unterschiedlich akzentuiert und mit verschiedenen Prozessen und Ereignissen in Verbindung gesetzt. Als wichtige Akteur*innen des Diskurses zur Neuordnung und zugleich als Kultur(ver)mittelnde innerhalb Europas treten u. a. Kulturschaffende und die Schriftsteller*innen auf, die aus dem mittel- bzw. osteuropäischen Raum stammen und deren Texte der interkulturellen Literatur zugeordnet werden können. Die Beiträger*innen diskutieren interdisziplinär, wie die relevanten Themen der Gegenwart, wie etwa literarische und außerliterarische Repr...