The Short Story in a Polish Context

Literature & Fiction

World Literature

Piasa Books

Political Thought in Renaissance Poland: An Anthology in English

Harold B. Segel

Fräulein Doktor dramatizes the exploits of Anna Marie Lesser, a beautiful and accomplished German spy during the First World War, who was based on an actual historical figure.  The original production in Poland in 1933, called "a theatrical sensation," broke all previous records for continuous theater performances.

Fräulein Doktor

Tepa, Jerzy W.

Contemporary

An anthology of Jan Lechon's American writings. Published to mark the 50th anniversary of his death. It claims to be the most comprehensive collection of his works in English.

Evening on the Hudson

Jan Lechon

A volume of essays by Poles and Polish Americans remembering and commemorating the life of John Paul II.

His Holiness Pope John Paul II: a commemorative volume of essays from the members of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

A Polish Book of Monsters contains five stories of speculative fiction edited and translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel, award-winning translator of the fiction of Stanislaw Lem. From dystopian science fiction to fabled fantasy, these dark tales grip us through the authors' ability to create utterly convincing alien worlds that nonetheless reflect our own.

A Polish Book of Monsters

Short Stories & Anthologies

Since 1989, new laws on higher educational institutions laid down rules for establishing Polish nonstate institutions of higher education, and their number has been steadily growing since then. The result of these legal changes, as well as Poland's agreeing to implement the Bologna Process and become a member of the European Higher Education Area, is that the higher education system in Poland has become much larger, as well as more inclusive and diverse, not only in the types of students it admits but in the types of institutions it contains. This book discusses the various changes and raises issues concerning Polish higher education both in state and private colleges, including the functioning of universities in the new environment, the employing and promoting of scholars, the conducting of research, methods for financing research on teaching, methods of raising the level of education in order to satisfy European and world standards, the role that learned societies might play in higher education in Poland, and the self-governance of students.

Higher Education in Poland: Perspectives, Opportunities, New Ideas

History

Europe

New Perspectives in Polish Culture: Personal Encounters, Public Affairs collects essays that examine the public-private dynamic as Polish culture-from the nineteenth century to the present day-interacts with the tensions, ambiguities, and idiosyncrasies of European modernity. The authors of these essays discuss Polish poetry, fiction, theatre, and literary and cultural theory. Writers and artists discussed in these essays range from Adam Mickiewicz and Joseph Conrad through Witold Gombrowicz, Miron Białoszewski, Czesław Miłosz, Zofia Nałkowska, and Tadeusz Kantor to Sławomir Mrożek, Tadeusz Rożewicz, the poets of bruLion, and the latest dramatists, as well as many other authors active both in Poland itself and in the Polish diaspora.

New Perspectives on Polish Culture: Private Encounters, Public Affairs

History & Criticism

Languages and Silence is an ethnography that focuses on a region of Silesia near Opole where the inhabitants speak three languages: Polish, German, and Silesian. The author spent several different extended periods of time living in a town that she calls Dobra, and she attempts to analyze the different ways that the inhabitants use the three languages and the situational, associational, political, and historical reasons they choose to speak whatever language they are speaking at any given moment. Elizabeth R. Vann describes interpersonal situations in which a speaker uses specific words in one language or another for a particular purpose. Among the study’s conclusions are that Silesian is associated with social familiarity and playfulness, while Polish is an expository register that makes a relatively intense, unidirectional claim on addressees’ attention, and German is used as “a language of conflict.”Additional dimensions of contrast have to do with speakers’ “evaluations of cultural and temporal distance,” with Silesian indicating cultural closeness (identity as well as indigeneity or archaism), Polish greater cultural distance (and fanciness), and German a farther extreme of otherness. The author also argues that the analysis of this linguistic complexity can tell us a lot both about how individuals construct their ethnic and national identities, and how that construction is interwoven with psychology, politics, and history.

Languages and Silence in the German-Polish Borderland

Vann, Elizabeth R.

From a contemporary perspective, it is easy to view the history of Poland and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from the late Middle Ages to the 19th century as a multicultural experiment that lasted over 400 years. This experiment reminds us, at least to a certain degree, of the situation of many of today's countries in western Europe. This association comes to mind as evident; but before we follow it, we must determine whether ethnic and religious differences in those times meant the same thing as they do today. The goal of the book is to show this diversity, to describe its individual components with an emphasis on their cultural richness, and thus to paint a portrait of the community that resulted from being long-term neighbors.The consequence of this kind of closeness can be friendship and cooperation as well as conflict. The essays collected in this volume focus on the nations of the historic Commonwealth, their numbers, geographical location, social structure, and impact on the political life and culture of the Commonwealth. The authors write not only about Lithuanians and Ruthenians, but also about immigrants to the Commonwealth: Germans, Jews, Armenians, Tatars, Karaites, and Gypsies, as well as Italians, Scots, and Dutch Mennonites.

Under a Common Sky: Ethnic Groups of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Piasa Books publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Piasa Books