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Good King Wenceslas
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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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Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City
The last two decades in the United States has seen the emergence of a mass alternative nation, populated by struggling screenwriters, oddball thrift stores, indie rockers, and thousands of coffee houses. It has sprouted in locales ranging from San Diego to Seattle, Athens to Cleveland. Now, in his new book NEO-BOHEMIA: Art and Industry in the Postindustrial City, Richard Lloyd asks: how did bohemia become such an ordinary thing? In the past, bohemia was always a small and embattled refuge for society's weirdos, its starving artists, its avant-garde, and its dope fiends. Now, not only is bohemian established district in every medium-sized city, it drives up real estate prices and gets promoted as a lifestyle amenity. In this witty exploration of one of America's most successful new bohemias, Chicago's Wicker Park—site of the hip film High Fidelity and launching pad of alt rock stars like Liz Phair—Lloyd shows that bohemia's new status is a result of broader social and economic transformations. Cities crave "creative" industries like media, tourism, advertising, and design, and hence have a newfound tolerance for nonconformists. As NEO-BOHEMIA shows, bohemia's creatures of the night, flaunting thrift store duds, piercings, and tribal tattoos, are the perfect labor force for these new industries. They are very creative, yet willing to work odd hours on a freelance basis. NEO-BOHEMIA is essential reading for anyone trying to get a handle not just on the growing prominence of alternative and hipster culture in America, but on how cities are retooling to become players in the information age economy..
Price: $18.90
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The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: Facing the Holocaust (Comprehensive History of the Holocaust)
“We were both small nations whose existence could never be taken for granted,” Vaclav Havel said of the Czechs and the Jews of Israel in 1990, and indeed, the complex and intimate link between the fortunes of these two peoples is unique in European history. This book, by one of the world’s leading authorities on the history of Czech and Slovak Jewry during the Nazi period, is the first to thoroughly document this singular relationship and to trace its impact, both practical and profound, on the fate of the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia during the Holocaust. Livia Rothkirchen provides a detailed and comprehensive history of how Nazi rule in the Czech lands was shaped as much by local culture and circumstances as by military policy. The extraordinary nature of the Czech Jews’ experience emerges clearly in chapters on the role of the Jewish minority in Czech life; the crises of the Munich agreement and the German occupation, the reaction of the local population to the persecution of the Jews, the policies of the London-based government in exile, the question of Jewish resistance, and the special case of the Terezin (Theresienstadt) ghetto. The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia is based on a wealth of primary documents, many uncovered only after the 1989 November Revolution. With an epilogue on the post-1945 period, this richly woven historical narrative supplies information essential to an understanding of the history of the Jews in Europe. .
Price: $27.27
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