Prague with Fingers of Rain
Prague with Fingers of Rain

Author: Vítězslav Nezval

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Limited

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 62

ISBN-13: 9781852248161

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Czech writer Vitezslav Nezval (1900-58) was one of the leading Surrealist poets of the 20th century. "Prague with Fingers of Rain" is his classic 1936 collection in which Prague's many-sided life - its glamorous history, various weathers, different kinds of people - becomes symbolic of what is contradictory and paradoxical in life itself. Mixing real and surreal, Nezval evokes life's contradictoriness in a series of psalm-like poems of puzzled love and generous humanity. Nezval was perhaps the most prolific writer in Prague during the 1920s and 30s. An original member of the avant-garde group of artists Devetsil ("Butterbur", literally: "Nine Forces"), he was a founding figure of the Poetist movement. His numerous books included poetry collections, experimental plays and novels, memoirs, essays and translations. His best work is from the interwar period. Along with Karel Teige, Jindrich Aetyrsku, and Toyen, Nezval frequently travelled to Paris, engaging with the French surrealists. Forging a friendship with Andre Breton and Paul Aeluard, he was instrumental in founding The Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia in 1934 (the first such group outside of France), serving as editor of the group's journal Surrealismus. His mastery of language and prosody was unparalleled - contemporaries referred to it as wizardry. Alongside with surrealist poetry, he wrote poems that sounded like genuine folksongs and for some time he teased the Czech literary public by the anonymous publication of three books attributed to a fictitious Robert David - one of 52 Villonesque ballades, another of 100 sonnets, all in strict classical form. His identity was guessed by the critics only because 'no one else would be able to do that'. This selection from his seminal collection has a specially commissioned foreword by Ivan Klima.

Daughter of Smoke & Bone
Daughter of Smoke & Bone

Author: Laini Taylor

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Published: 2011-09-27

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 0316192147

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The first book in the New York Times bestselling epic fantasy trilogy by award-winning author Laini Taylor Around the world, black handprints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky. In a dark and dusty shop, a devil's supply of human teeth grown dangerously low. And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherworldly war. Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she's prone to disappearing on mysterious "errands"; she speaks many languages--not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out. When one of the strangers--beautiful, haunted Akiva--fixes his fire-colored eyes on her in an alley in Marrakesh, the result is blood and starlight, secrets unveiled, and a star-crossed love whose roots drink deep of a violent past. But will Karou live to regret learning the truth about herself?

Somewhere There Is Still a Sun
Somewhere There Is Still a Sun

Author: Michael Gruenbaum

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2017-04-25

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 144248487X

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When the Nazis invade Czechoslovakia in 1941, twelve-year-old Michael and his family are deported from Prague to the Terezin concentration camp, where his mother's will and ingenuity keep them from being transported to Auschwitz and certain death.

The Absolute Gravedigger
The Absolute Gravedigger

Author: Nezval

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9788086264493

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The Absolute Gravedigger, published in 1937, is in many ways the culmination of Va-tÄ>zslav Nezval's work as an avant-garde poet, combining the Poetism of his earlier work and his turn to Surrealism in the 1930s with his political concerns in the years leading up to World War II. It is above all a collection of startling verbal and visual inventiveness. And while a number of salient political issues emerge from the Surrealist ommatidia, Nezval's imagination here is completely free-wheeling and untethered to any specific locale as he displays mastery of a variety of forms, from long-limbed imaginative free verse narratives to short, formally rhymed meditations in quatrains, to prose and even visual art (the volume includes six of his decalcomania images). Together with his previous two collections, The Absolute Gravedigger forms one of the most important corpora of interwar Surrealist poetry. Yet here Nezval's wild albeit restrained mix of absolute freedom and formal perfection has shifted its focus to explore the darker imagery of putrefaction and entropy, the line breaks in the shorter lyric poems slicing the language into fragments that float in the mind with open-ended meaning and a multiplicity of readings. Inspired by Salvador Dala-'s paranoiac-critical method, the poems go in directions that are at first unimaginable but continue to evolve unexpectedly until they resolve or dissolve -- like electron clouds, they have a form within which a seemingly chaotic energy reigns. Nezval's language, however, is under absolute control, allowing him to reach into the polychromatic clouds of Surrealist uncertainty to form shapes we recognize, though never expected to see, to meld images and concepts into a constantly developing and dazzling kaleidoscope.

The Czech Reader
The Czech Reader

Author: Jan Bažant

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2010-12-13

Total Pages: 577

ISBN-13: 0822347946

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Frances Starn is a writer living in Berkeley, California. --Book Jacket.

Prague Palimpsest
Prague Palimpsest

Author: Alfred Thomas

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-10-15

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 0226795411

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A city of immense literary mystique, Prague has inspired writers across the centuries with its beauty, cosmopolitanism, and tragic history. Envisioning the ancient city in central Europe as a multilayered text, or palimpsest, that has been constantly revised and rewritten—from the medieval and Renaissance chroniclers who legitimized the city’s foundational origins to the modernists of the early twentieth century who established its reputation as the new capital of the avant-garde—Alfred Thomas argues that Prague has become a paradoxical site of inscription and effacement, of memory and forgetting, a utopian link to the prewar and pre-Holocaust European past and a dystopia of totalitarian amnesia. Considering a wide range of writers, including the city’s most famous son, Franz Kafka, Prague Palimpsest reassesses the work of poets and novelists such as Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, Gustav Meyrink, Jan Neruda, Vítĕzslav Nezval, and Rainer Maria Rilke and engages with other famous authors who “wrote” Prague, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Ingeborg Bachmann, Albert Camus, Paul Celan, and W. G. Sebald. The result is a comparative, interdisciplinary study that helps to explain why Prague—more than any other major European city—has haunted the cultural and political imagination of the West.

The Lost Wife
The Lost Wife

Author: Alyson Richman

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2011-09-06

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1101552549

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A rapturous novel of star-crossed love in a time of war—from the international bestselling author of The Secret of Clouds. During the last moments of calm in prewar Prague, Lenka, a young art student, and Josef, who is studying medicine, fall in love. With the promise of a better future, they marry—only to have their dreams shattered by the imminent Nazi invasion. Like so many others, they are torn apart by the currents of war. Now a successful obstetrician in America, Josef has never forgotten the wife he believes died in the war. But in the Nazi ghetto of Terezín, Lenka survived, relying on her skills as an artist and the memories of a husband she would never see again. Then, decades later and thousands of miles away, an unexpected encounter in New York leads to an inescapable glance of recognition, and the realization that providence has given Lenka and Josef one more chance. From the glamorous ease of life in Prague before the occupation to the horrors of Nazi Europe, The Lost Wife explores the power of first love, the resilience of the human spirit, and our capacity to remember.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

Author: Vítězslav Nezval

Publisher:

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13:

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"Written in 1935 at the height of Czech Surrealism but not published until 1945, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a bizarre erotic fantasy of a young girl's maturation into womanhood. Drawing on Matthew Lewis's The Monk, Sade's Justine, K. H. Macha's May, and Murnau's Nosferatu as well as the form and language of the pulp serial novel, Nezval has constructed a lyrical, menacing dream of sexual awakening involving a vampire with a taste for chicken blood, changelings, a lecherous priest, a malicious grandmother desiring her lost youth, and an androgynous merging of brother with sister. Part fairy tale, part Gothic horror, the novel is a meditation on youth and age, sexuality and death - an exploration of the grotesque that juxtaposes high and low genres with shifting registers of language and moods, thus placing it squarely in the tradition of the Czech avant-garde."--BOOK JACKET.

The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe
The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe

Author: D. Gafijczuk

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-09-27

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 113730586X

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Focusing on Central Europe, the volume proposes a new paradigm of how culture works, based on a model of "inhabited ruins" as a space where contradictory elements come together into continually renewed and frequently paradoxical configurations. Examines art, architecture, literature and music.

Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia
Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia

Author: Krzysztof Fijalkowski

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1351547410

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Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia: On the Needles of Days sheds much-needed light on the location of the greatest concentration of Surrealist photography and examines the culture and tradition within which it has taken root and flourished. The volume explores a rich and important artistic output, very little of which has been seen outside of its land of origin. Based on extensive research at museums in Prague and Brno and many conversations with participants in and historians of the movement, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Michael Richardson and Ian Walker analyse how this photographic work has developed cohesively and rigorously, from the beginnings of Czech Surrealism in 1934, to the intriguing researches of the present-day Czech and Slovak Surrealist group by way of mysterious veiled responses to the repressive contexts with which they were faced from the 1950s to the 1980s. The main chapters, ordered chronologically, are intersected with shorter texts examining specific works. The reader will find in this volume images that present challenges to our understanding of how photographic work has been used within surrealism, pinpointing individual pictures whose dynamic charge may induce instants of compelling interrogation and disruption.