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:
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.
Download or read book Dances of the whole world on postage stamps written by Alkēs Raphtēs and published by Adamantia Christof. This book was released on 1998 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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.
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.
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.
Download or read book Rambling On written by Bohumil Hrabal and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2016-05-01 with total page 221 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.
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.
Download or read book Notebooks from New Guinea written by Vojtech Novotny and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-11 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some of the world's most advanced work on biodiversity is being carried out deep in the jungles of Papua New Guinea by a team including local tribes-people. Novotny's entertaining, engaging, and unique diaries reflect on the wisdom of the ancient culture, bringing to life the people and the sometimes tragi-comic interactions between it and the West
Download or read book Why I Write written by Bohumil Hrabal and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of the earliest prose by one of literature’s greatest stylists captures, as scholar Arnault Maréchal put it, “the moment when Hrabal discovered the magic of writing.” Taken from the period when Bohumil Hrabal shifted his focus from poetry to prose, these stories—many written in school notebooks, typed and read aloud to friends, or published in samizdat—often showcase raw experiments in style that would define his later works. Others intriguingly utilize forms the author would never pursue again. Featuring the first appearance of key figures from Hrabal’s later writings, such as his real-life Uncle Pepin, who would become a character in his later fiction and is credited here as a coauthor of one piece, the book also contains stories that Hrabal would go on to cannibalize for some of his most famous novels. All together, Why I Write? offers readers the chance to explore this liminal phase of Hrabal’s writing. Expertly interpreted by award-winning Hrabal translator David Short, this collection comprises some of the last remaining prose works by Hrabal to be translated into English. A treasure trove for Hrabal devotees, Why I Write? allows us to see clearly why this great prose master was, as described by Czech writer and publisher Josef Škvorecký, “fundamentally a lyrical poet.”
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.
Download or read book The Sound of the Sundial written by Hana Andronikova and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2015-05-02 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sound of the Sundial is the internationally acclaimed novel by Czech sensation Hana Andronikova, told over the course of a single day and night, but spanning three continents and much of the twentieth century. In this intimate and affecting love story about a Jewish teacher and a German-Czech builder, Andronikova sends her readers on a captivating journey through time and memory, from the Czech town of Zlín in the 1920s to Calcutta in the 1930s, Theresienstadt and Auschwitz during World War II, Toronto in the decades afterward, and finally into modern-day Colorado. It is at once a deeply personal narrative and an homage to the lost relationship of the Czech, German, and Jewish peoples. In 2002, The Sound of the Sundial received the Czech Republic’s prestigious Magnesia Litera Award in the category of Best New Discovery, just a few years before its young author died. It is making its world premiere appearance in English here.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
