Download or read book Soviet Milk written by Nora Ikstena and published by Peirene Press. This book was released on 2018-03-08 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The literary bestseller that took the Baltics by storm now published for the first time in English. This novel considers the effects of Soviet rule on a single individual. The central character in the story tries to follow her calling as a doctor. But then the state steps in. She is deprived first of her professional future, then of her identity and finally of her relationship with her daughter. Banished to a village in the Latvian countryside, her sense of isolation increases. Will she and her daughter be able to return to Riga when political change begins to stir? Why Peirene chose to publish this book: At first glance this novel depicts a troubled mother-daughter relationship set in the the Soviet-ruled Baltics between 1969 and 1989. Yet just beneath the surface lies something far more positive: the story of three generations of women, and the importance of a grandmother giving her granddaughter what her daughter is unable to provide – love, and the desire for life. 'Nora Ikstena is proving that Latvia is speaking in a bold and original voice.' Rosie Goldsmith, broadcaster and reviewer 'Nora Ikstena's fiction opens up new paths not only for Latvian literature in English translation but for English literature itself.' Jeremy Davis, Dalkey Archive Press

Download or read book Latvian Literature written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Five Fingers written by Māra Zālīte and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Five-year-old Laura was born in one of Joseph Stalin’s prison camps in Siberia. When the book opens, she and her parents are on their long journey back to Latvia, a country Laura knows only from the exuberant descriptions that whirled about the Gulag. Upon her arrival, however, she must come to terms with the conflicting images of the life she sees around her and the fairytale Latvia she grew up hearing about and imagining. Based on the author’s life, and written in lush language that defies the narrative’s many hardships, Five Fingers tells the story of a girl who moves between worlds in the hopes of finding a Latvia that she can call home.

Download or read book The Book of Riga written by Pauls Bankovskis and published by Comma Press. This book was released on 2018-04-12 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A suicide attempt, staged to attract as much attention as possible, from the top of St. Peter’s Church, quickly evolves into an outlandish and absurd, televised spectacle... When a PA is invited into her boss’s office one day to observe a protest unfold, just as he predicts, in the streets below, she begins to suspect his powers of foresight might extend beyond mere business matters... Finally moving into the house of her dreams, on the island of Kīpsala, a single mother discovers a strange affinity with the previous occupant... Riga may be over 800 years old as a city, but its status as capital of an independent Latvia is only a century old, with half of that time spent under Soviet rule. Despite this, it has established itself as a vibrant, creative hub, attracting artists, performers, and writers from across the Baltic region. The stories gathered here chronicle this growth and on-going transformation, and offer glimpses into the dark humour, rich history, contrasting perspectives, and love of the mythic, that sets the city’s artistic community apart. As its history might suggest, Riga is a work in progress; and for many of the characters in these stories, it is the possibilities of what the city might become, more than merely what it is now, that drives the imagination of its people. This book is published with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia and The Latvian Writers Union. Foreword by former President of Latvia (1999-2007) Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga. Translated from the Latvian by Kaija Straumanis, Suzanne McQuade, Uldis Balodis, Ieva Lešinska, Mārta Ziemelis and Žanete Vēvere Pasqualini.

Download or read book Green Crow written by Kristine Ulberga and published by Peter Owen Publishers. This book was released on 2018-05-30 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of the Peter Owen World Series: BalticsInstitutionalized in an asylum, a woman with a record of hallucinations commits her life story to paper. She records, from the age of six, her earliest memories of a drunken and abusive father, the strange men her mother introduced to repair the family, the imaginary forest to which she would run for safety and, of course, the talking Green Crow who appeared when she most needed her. The Green Crow is a conceited, boisterous creature who follows the novel's nameless protagonist throughout her life, until the day that the crow's presence begins to embarrass her. Confined to a tedious domestic life, she is desperate to hide the crow's very existence. Failing to do so, she winds up in a psychiatric hospital. Can she repress and renounce her acerbic, sharp-beaked daemon - or learn to love herself, bird and all? Translated from the Latvian by Zanete Vevere Pasqualini

Download or read book DOOM 94 written by Jānis Joņevs and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Doom 94 is Jonevs' debut novel, published first as Jelgava 94 in Latvia in 2013 and was quickly proved to be a big hit and bestseller. Translated into 11 languages already, it is here for the first time in English. The story is set in the 1990s in the Latvian city of Jelgava and looks at the burgeoning craze during this decade for the alternative culture of heavy metal music. Jonevs takes the reader deep inside the world of music, combining the intimate diary of a youngster trying to find himself by joining a subculture, as well as a skilful, detailed, and almost documentary-like depiction of the beginnings of the second independence of Latvia-where Jonevs is the first writer to stir up memories of this period through a fully-fledged literary depiction. Doom 94 is a portrait of a generation searching for their identity and up against the world, trying not to become 'one of them'. But is it for real? Can any adult keep the promise made as a child?

Download or read book Literary History and Popular Enlightenment in Latvian Culture written by Pauls Daija and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-11 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Enlightenment of peasants, an 18th-century phenomenon that originated from an interest in common people and ideas of about the emancipation of the lower classes, had a crucial impact on creating Latvian secular literary culture. When Baltic German intellectuals, inspired by the Popular Enlightenment in German-speaking countries, undertook the task to educate Latvian peasants through books, they also laid the foundation for the future emancipation of Latvian culture. By exploring the nature of book production and changing images of peasants in Livonia and Courland in the second part of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, this book offers insights into the complex historical relationship between Latvians and Baltic Germans and the regional specifics of the Baltic Enlightenment.

Download or read book High Tide written by Inga Ābele and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Told more or less in reverse chronological order, High Tide is the story of Ieva, her dead lover, her imprisoned husband and the way their youthful decisions dramatically impacted the rest of their lives. Taking place over three decades, High Tide functions as a sort of psychological mystery, with the full scope of Ieva's personal situation and the relationship between the three main characters only becoming clear at the end of the novel. One of Latvia's most notable young writers, Abele is a fresh voice in European fiction, her prose is direct, evocative and exceptionally beautiful.

Download or read book Latvian Literature written by Aleksis Rubulis and published by Daugavas. This book was released on 1964 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A New History of Latvian Literature written by Ryszard Nycz and published by Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, scholars from diverse research fields (literature, history, art history, and folklore studies) scan the nineteenth-century Latvian literature from various perspectives, taking into account links between literature, oral culture and visual art as well as the interactions between social transformations and aesthetic developments.

Download or read book Flesh Coloured Dominoes written by Zigmunds Skujins and published by Arcadia Books. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Baroness Valtraute von Bruegen's officer husband's body is severed in two she is delighted to find that the lower half has been sewn onto the upper body of the humble local Captain Ulste. She conceives a child only to see the return of her husband in one piece. A beautifully written surrealist novel cum political allegory, Flesh-Coloured Dominoes transports the reader between 18th Century Baltic gentry and the narrator's life in the modern world. The connection between the two narratives gradually becomes clear in a mesmerising fantasy of love, lust and loss as Skijuns creates a work of sublime art that is funny, moving, enlightening and philosophical in equal measure.

Download or read book Latvia written by Mara Kalnins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-04 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of the Latvian people begins some four and a half millennia ago with the arrival of the proto-Baltic Indo-Europeans to northern Europe. One branch of these migrants coalesced into a community which evolved a distinctive and remarkably robust culture and language, and which eventually developed into a loose federation of tribal kingdoms that stretched from the shores of the Baltic sea to the upper Dniepr river. But these small independent kingdoms were unable to resist the later invasion of the Teutonic Knights in 1201, an invasion that initiated nearly eight hundred years of helotry for the Latvians in their own domains. In the centuries of domination by successive European powers that followed, the inhabitants nonetheless preserved a powerful sense of identity, fostered by their ancient language, oral literature, songs and customs. These in turn informed and gave impetus to the rise of national consciousness in the nineteenth century and the political activities of the twentieth which brought the modern nation-state of Latvia into being. This book traces the genesis and growth of that nation, its endurance over centuries of conquest and oppression, the process by which it achieved its independence, and its status as a member of the European community in the twenty-first century.

Download or read book Library of Congress Subject Headings written by Library of Congress and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 1480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book History of the Literary Cultures of East Central Europe written by Marcel Cornis-Pope and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007-07-18 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third volume in the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe focuses on the making and remaking of those institutional structures that engender and regulate the creation, distribution, and reception of literature. The focus here is not so much on shared institutions but rather on such region-wide analogous institutional processes as the national awakening, the modernist opening, and the communist regimentation, the canonization of texts, and censorship of literature. These processes, which took place in all of the region’s cultures, were often asynchronous and subjected to different local conditions. The volume’s premise is that the national awakening and institutionalization of literature were symbiotically interrelated in East-Central Europe. Each national awakening involves a language renewal, an introduction of the vernacular and its literature in schools and universities, the creation of an infrastructure for the publication of books and journals, clashes with censorship, the founding of national academies, libraries, and theaters, a (re)construction of national folklore, and the writing of histories of the vernacular literature. The four parts of this volume are titled: (1) Publishing and Censorship, (2) Theater as a Literary Institution, (3) Forging Primal Pasts: The Uses of Folk Poetry, and (4) Literary Histories: Itineraries of National Self-images.

Download or read book Library of Congress Subject Headings written by Library of Congress. Cataloging Policy and Support Office and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 1512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Strategic Frames written by Jennie L. Schulze and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2018-03-07 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joseph Rothschild Book Prize Honorable Mention Strategic Frames analyzes minority policies in Estonia and Latvia following their independence from the Soviet Union. It weighs the powerful influence of both Europe and Russia on their policy choices, and how this intersected with the costs and benefits of policy changes for the politicians in each state. Prior to EU accession, policymakers were slow to adopt minority-friendly policies for ethnic Russians despite mandates from the European Union. These initiatives faced majority opposition, and politicians sought to maintain the status quo and their positions. As Jennie L. Schulze reveals, despite the credit given to the democratizing influence of European institutions, they have rarely produced significant policy changes alone, and then only when domestic constraints were low. Whenever domestic opposition was high, Russian frames were crucial for the passage of reforms. In these cases, Russia’s activism on behalf of Russian speakers reinforced European frames, providing powerful justifications for reform. Schulze’s attention to both the strategic framing and counter framing of external actors explains the controversies, delays, and suboptimal outcomes surrounding the passage of “conditional” amendments in both cases, as well as the local political climate postaccession. Strategic Frames offers a significant reference on recent developments in two former Soviet states and the rapidly evolving spheres of political influence in the postindependence era that will serve students, scholars, and policymakers alike.

Download or read book Colloquial Latvian written by Dace Prauliņš and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new edition of Colloquial Latvian has been completely rewritten to make learning Latvian easier and more enjoyable than ever before! Specially written by experienced teachers for self-study or class use, the course offers a step-by-step approach to written and spoken Latvian. No prior knowledge of the language is required. What makes Colloquial Latvian your best choice in personal language learning? interactive – lots of exercises for regular practice clear – concise grammar notes practical – useful vocabulary and pronunciation guide complete – including answer key and reference section. By the end of this rewarding course, you will be able to communicate confidently and effectively in Latvian in a broad range of everyday situations. Audio material to accompany the course is available to download free in MP3 format from www.routledge.com/cw/colloquials. Recorded by native speakers, the audio material features the dialogues and texts from the book and will help develop your listening and pronunciation skills.