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Good King Wenceslas
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Prague in Danger: The Years of German Occupation, 1939-45: Memories and History, Terror and Resistance, Theater and Jazz, Film and Poetry, Politics and War
A dramatic account of life in Czechoslovakia’s great capital during the Nazi Protectorate With this successor book to Prague in Black and Gold, his account of more than a thousand years of Central European history, the great scholar Peter Demetz focuses on just six short years—a tormented, tragic, and unforgettable time. He was living in Prague then—a “first-degree half-Jew,” according to the Nazis’ terrible categories—and here he joins his objective chronicle of the city under German occupation with his personal memories of that period: from the bitter morning of March 15, 1939, when Hitler arrived from Berlin to set his seal on the Nazi takeover of the Czechoslovak government, until the liberation of Bohemia in April 1945, after long seasons of unimaginable suffering and pain. Demetz expertly interweaves a superb account of the German authorities’ diplomatic, financial, and military machinations with a brilliant description of Prague’s evolving resistance and underground opposition. Along with his private experiences, he offers the heretofore untold history of an effervescent, unstoppable Prague whose urbane heart went on beating despite the deportations, murders, cruelties, and violence: a Prague that kept its German- and Czech-language theaters open, its fabled film studios functioning, its young people in school and at work, and its newspapers on press. This complex, continually surprising book is filled with rare human detail and warmth, the gripping story of a great city meeting the dual challenge of occupation and of war. .
Price: $12.49
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The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History
In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare gave the landlocked country of Bohemia a coastline--a famous and, to Czechs, typical example of foreigners' ignorance of the Czech homeland Although the lands that were once the Kingdom of Bohemia lie at the heart of Europe, Czechs are usually encountered only in the margins of other people's stories. In The Coasts of Bohemia, Derek Sayer reverses this perspective. He presents a comprehensive and long-needed history of the Czech people that is also a remarkably original history of modern Europe, told from its uneasy center. Sayer shows that Bohemia has long been a theater of European conflict. It has been a cradle of Protestantism and a bulwark of the Counter-Reformation; an Austrian imperial province and a proudly Slavic national state; the most easterly democracy in Europe; and a westerly outlier of the Soviet bloc. The complexities of its location have given rise to profound (and often profoundly comic) reflections on the modern condition. Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, Karel Capek and Milan Kundera are all products of its spirit of place. Sayer describes how Bohemia's ambiguities and contradictions are those of Europe itself, and he considers the ironies of viewing Europe, the West, and modernity from the vantage point of a country that has been too often ignored. The Coasts of Bohemia draws on an enormous array of literary, musical, visual, and documentary sources ranging from banknotes to statues, museum displays to school textbooks, funeral orations to operatic stage-sets, murals in subway stations to censors' indexes of banned books. It brings us into intimate contact with the ever changing details of daily life--the street names and facades of buildings, the heroes figured on postage stamps--that have created and recreated a sense of what it is to be Czech. Sayer's sustained concern with questions of identity, memory, and power place the book at the heart of contemporary intellectual debate. It is an extraordinary story, beautifully told..
Price: $24.24
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French Quarter Fiction: The Newest Stories of America's Oldest Bohemia
Branching across every genre, from mystery and romance to flash fiction and prose poetry, this anthology features the best works by living writers on the heart of New Orleans, with one previously unpublished by Tennessee Williams. It features Ellen Gilchrist, Richard Ford, Robert Olen Butler, Andrei Codrescu, Barry Gifford, Poppy Z. Brite, Julie Smith, John Biguenet, Nancy Lemann, and Valerie Martin, among others. The characters in these works find themselves everywhere, from Sarajevo on the eve of the First World War to Algiers Point just across the Mississippi River, but their stories are all anchored in the French Quarter. They wander, from the 18th-century New World to a rooftop view of Bourbon Street on the cusp of the third millennium. Interspersed with the history of the city, these stories penetrate the standard cliches and reflect the true sense of the French Quarter - its sensuality, mystery, the life behind its walls - and lift the veils of privacy altogether. Whether surrealism or satire, these exceptional stories are beautiful, poignant, tragic, and comic..
Price: $6.60
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Another Scandal in Bohemia: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler
A novel of suspense featuring Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler Originally titled Irene’s Last WaltzThe ever-irresistible Irene Adler, her dashing barrister husband, Godfrey Norton, and the indomitable Miss Nell Huxleigh have arrived at last as their French cottage-having survived dastardly plots, Russian spies, pistol-wielding criminals, and the occasional cobra. The happy trio seeks nothing but rest and peace-but Irene has always chafed under idle conditions, and Paris, she says, "is pretty and urbane, but hardly a center of excitement." So when Charles Frederick Worth, the Parisian king of couture, invites Irene to become his "mannequin de ville," to wear the fabulous worth creations to stimulate his trade, Irene leaps at the chance. But what was a joyous lark soon turns into a journey that can lead to disgrace, dishonor, and death when Irene, Nell, and Godfrey are drawn into a series of events that will compel Irene to the one place that she daren't go and the one man she must not confront-Prague and the King of Bohemia. .
Price: $2.35
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Berkeley Bohemia Artists and Visionaries of the Early 20th Century
Berkeley Bohemia highlights the contributions of the eccentric residents of one of America's centers of cultural innovation, during a critical period in the development of the country's radical thought. These writers and artists included Ansel Adams, Jack London, Dorothea Lange, John Muir, Bernard Maybeck, Joaquin Miller, Ina Coolbrith, and Charles and Lousie Keeler and other colorful characters less well known today. Due to its vibrant setting as a crossroads of cultures, Berkeley continues as a fertile ground for individuality, eccentricity, and creative expression. The Berkeley legacy of scholars and visionaries has inspired three generations of men and women, who still make Berkeley a place where ordinary people can flourish creatively, and the extraordinary is welcomed. .
Price: $9.48
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Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris
A radical reconceptualization of modernism, this book traces the appearance of the modern artist to the Paris of the 1830s and links the emergence of an enduring modernist aesthetic to the fleeting forms of popular culture. Contrary to conventional views of a private self retreating from history and modernity, Popular Bohemia shows us the modernist as a public persona parodying the stereotypes of commercial mass culture. Here we see how the modern artist—alternately assuming the roles of the melodramatic hero, the urban flâneur, the female hysteric, the tribal primitive—created his own version of an expressive, public modernity in opposition to an increasingly repressive and conformist bourgeois culture. And here we see how a specifically modern aesthetic culture in nineteenth-century Paris came about, not in opposition to commercial popular culture, but in close alliance with it. Popular Bohemia revises dominant historical narratives about modernism from the perspective of a theoretically informed cultural history that spans the period between 1830 and 1914. In doing so, it reconnects the intellectual history of avant-garde art with the cultural history of bohemia and the social history of the urban experience to reveal the circumstances in which a truly modernist culture emerged. (20070301).
Price: $9.98
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