Books about Bohemia from Amazon.com

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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.
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Price: $11.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A common sight in American cities today is the local bohemia, filled with hipsters, funky stores, picturesque dive bars, and aspiring artists. Yet not so long ago, these sorts of districts were relatively rare, and one had to travel to San Francisco or Greenwich Village to experience bohemia in all its glory. The last two decades, however, 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. In Neo-Bohemia, 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 bohemia an established district in every medium-sized city, it drives up real estate prices and gets promoted as a lifestyle amenity. In this witty explorationof 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 like Chicago that are trying to shift from the industrial to the postindustrial era no longer rely on smokestack industries. Rather, they 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. And the success of Wicker Park has only attracted more aspiring artists ready to toil in the information and tourism sectors at relatively low wages.

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: $17.90 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In The Winter's Tale, a play of 1610, William Shakespeare gave a coastline to Bohemia, a landlocked country. Three hundred and twenty-eight years later, his compatriot Neville Chamberlain would call a brewing war in Czechoslovakia, as the country was called, "a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing." As Canadian scholar Sayer writes, knowingly, Bohemia eventually got its coastline, one "guarded by minefields, barbed-wire fences, and tall watchtowers with machine guns," while the West took little notice. The general ignorance of all things Czech would cost Europe dearly, for conflagrations from the Thirty Years War to World War II (and even sparks that might have ignited World War III) have begun in the tiny country known by many names---Czechoslovakia, Bohemia, Moravia. Canadian scholar Sayer writes of the Czechs' struggle over centuries to define themselves as a people and nation, and he does so in a vivid, detailed narrative that will enlighten readers who are unfamiliar with the critically important center of Eastern Europe. --Gregory McNamee.
Price: $22.65 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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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.

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Price: $16.91 [Notify me when price goes down.]

When plague strikes London, Lord Westfield's Men count themselves fortunate they've been invited to perform as part of the wedding celebrations for Sophia Magdalena, the fair maid of Bohemia. The long

journey across Europe is a daunting prospect but stage manger Nicholas Bracewell is confident they will arrive safely, and confident the mission Lord Westfield sets them to deliver secret documents to Talbot Roydon, an English alchemist at the Imperial Court, will go without a hitch. En route, murder strikes one of the actors during their first performance at Flushing. It's the first of many setbacks. Once in Prague, Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II proves a madcap host. Worse, not only do attacks on the players continue as the royal wedding day

approaches, but someone kidnaps Nicholas' sweetheart Anne Henrik.....
Price: $8.93 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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. 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: $8.28 [Notify me when price goes down.]