Zapolska was one of Poland’s foremost modernist playwrights, and… an uncompromising explorer of gender construction and class oppression in fin-de-siècle Poland.

 

Chopin's Second Ballade, Op. 38 is frequently performed, yet remains very poorly understood – disagreement prevails on issues from its tonic and two-key structure to its posited relationship with the poems of the great Romantic bard Adam Mickiewicz. Chopin's Polish Ballade is a reexamination and close analysis of this famous work, revealing the Ballade as a piece with a powerful political story to tell.

Ingenious, entertaining, and convincing – Jonathan Bellman's book deftly demonstrates how the study of a single piece of music can open a new window onto an entire cultural world. – Kenneth Hamilton

 

Spanning Polish history from the days of incipient rebellion against Communist rule through the Solidarity movement of the 1980s to today s democratic Poland, Performative Democracy sheds new light on what it is people are doing when they act democratically. Even as Matynia, who participated in many of the events she describes, elucidates their common features, she captures and infectiously renders their exhilarating atmosphere and spirit to the reader. – Jonathan Schell, author of The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence and the Will of the People

 

Wojciech Jagielski has already achieved recognition for his reporting from the most inflamed points on our globe. [This latest work] will only confirm his reputation. – Ryszard Kapuscinski

 

The essays in Grotowski's Empty Room analyze how the internationally renowned Polish director Grotowski’s explorations in the theater continue to challenge dramatists and directors.

 

It is absolutely one of the best eye-witness accounts of WWII Poland that I’ve ever read.
- Alan Furst, author of The Foreign Correspondent and The Spies of Warsaw

 

A history of the Polish cinema through the end of the twentieth century, with a special focus on political and economic contexts. Now in paperback.

 

One of the most famous actresses of her time, and inspiration for Susan Sontag’s last novel, In America, Helena Modjeska (Helena Modrzejewska, 1840-1909) enjoyed an unprecedented career in Poland before moving to the United States at age 36 to launch an equally remarkable career in this country. This biographical study provides a quick and interesting introduction to her life.

 

Szuber’s work is poised between the rigors of making poetry and life itself in all its messy glory, between the devastations of history and the quiet act of observing our place in it all.

Szuber’s poetry speaks to the hard part of the soul. - Zbigniew Herbert

 

“Jacek Dehnel's slim bilingual anthology collects some of the most classically lucid poetry in Polish published in the past decade.”
– The Times Literary Supplement

 

Like his associates Baranczak, Krynicki, and Zagajewski, Julian Kornhauser is a major figure of the New Wave generation of Polish poets. This remarkable selection from his recent work brings this important Polish writer into English for the first time.

 

Pilch masterfully plays with the tradition of the drunkard novel, demonstrating just how close the alcoholic’s self-fashioning is to the writer’s self-narration. In this way, Pilch’s novel constitutes an act of belief in literature.... The book’s wonderful, delirious and baroque style imparts the experience of dependence, exclusion, and loneliness, as well as the overcoming of loneliness through love. – Maria Janion, head of the jury for the 2001 NIKE Literary Award

 

…an objective history that is needed in today’s America and Poland. The hero … is one of the fathers of modern democracy in the same mold as Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Lincoln. – Adam Michnik, Solidarnosc activist and editor in chief of Gazeta Wyborcza

…a sweeping, colorful, and absorbing biography that should restore Kosciuszko to his proper place in history – Andrew Nagorski, Newsweek

Readers of military and American history should take note: the minute details will enthrall devotees. Casual readers will benefit from Storozynski's expert crafting of a readable and fact-filled story that pulls readers into the immediacy of the revolutionary era's partisan and financial troubles. – Publishers Weekly

In a meticulously researched work, Storozynski greatly enhances our understanding of Kosciuszko’s personality and motivations by investigating the Pole’s relationship and feelings toward Africans, Jews, and peasants. His contribution advances our knowledge of this complex character whom Jefferson considered the ‘purest son of liberty’ he ever knew. – James Pula, Purdue University

…a testament to a great man and an important addition to world history. – Byron E. Price, Texas Southern University

 

In this insightful book, Jaroslaw Anders looks at how the major works of 20th-century Polish literature constantly transformed historical experience into the metaphysical, philosophical, or religious exploration of human existence. Between Fire and Sleep offers a fresh understanding of modern Polish culture.

 

Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), Poland’s national poet, was one of the extraordinary personalities of the age. Roman Koropeckyj draws a portrait of the Polish poet as a quintessential European Romantic. This richly illustrated biography-the first scholarly biography of the poet to be published in English since 1911-draws extensively on diaries, memoirs, correspondence, and the poet’s literary texts to make sense of a life as sublime as it was tragic.