1926. A mother and her young daughter come to Los Angeles. The mother is chasing her dream: she wants to conquer Hollywood, no matter the cost. Her little girl, Anastasia, is the perfect candidate to be cinema's next big star. But can she stand the pressure? The clash of dreams and the dirty reality of show business is a heavy burden to bear, as Anastasia comes face to face with the crime, abuse, and murky secrets of an all-powerful industry. A story that calls into question the so-called golden era of Hollywood, when the "dream factory" resembled a Byzantine empire, above the law and fed by vanity and greed.
1926. A mother and her young daughter come to Los Angeles. The mother is chasing her dream: she wants to conquer Hollywood, no matter the cost. Her little girl, Anastasia, is the perfect candidate to be cinema's next big star. But can she stand the pressure? The clash of dreams and the dirty reality of show business is a heavy burden to bear, as Anastasia comes face to face with the crime, abuse, and murky secrets of an all-powerful industry. A story that calls into question the so-called golden era of Hollywood, when the "dream factory" resembled a Byzantine empire, above the law and fed by vanity and greed.
Being Poland offers a unique analysis of the cultural developments that took place in Poland after World War One, a period marked by Poland's return to independence. Conceived to address the lack of critical scholarship on Poland's cultural restoration, Being Poland illuminates the continuities, paradoxes, and contradictions of Poland's modern and contemporary cultural practices, and challenges the narrative typically prescribed to Polish literature and film. Reflecting the radical changes, rifts, and restorations that swept through Poland in this period, Polish literature and film reveal a multitude of perspectives. Addressing romantic perceptions of the Polish immigrant, the politics of post-war cinema, poetry, and mass media, Being Poland is a comprehensive reference work written with the intention of exposing an international audience to the explosion of Polish literature and film that emerged in the twentieth century.
In Search of Singularity introduces a new “compairative” methodology that seeks to understand how the interplay of paired texts creates meaning in new, transcultural contexts. Bringing the worlds of contemporary Polish and Chinese poetry since 1989 into conversation with one another, Joanna Krenz applies the concept of singularity to draw out resonances and intersections between these two discourses and shows how they have responded to intertwined historical and political trajectories and a new reality beyond the human. Drawing on developments such as AI poetry and ecopoetry, Krenz makes the case for a fresh approach to comparative poetry studies that takes into account new forms of poetic expression and probes into alternative grammars of understanding.
In Cursed, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir investigates the July 4, 1946, Kielce pogrom, a milestone in the periodization of the Jewish diaspora. This massacre compelled thousands of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust to flee postwar Poland. It remains a negative reference point in the Polish historical narrative and represents a lack of reckoning with the role of antisemitism in postwar Polish society and identity politics. Tokarska-Bakir weaves together the voices of the Kielce pogrom survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators with a myriad of other archival sources. Her meticulous research exposes wartime and postwar biographies of local factory workers, city and church officials, local police officers, and members of the security service, some of whom participated in the Holocaust and then directly or indirectly participated in the Kielce pogrom. Tokarska-Bakir paints a social portrait that explores people's behavior in light of forces and emotions greater than themselves. She reconstructs a postwar communist system that, despite promises to combat deeply rooted antisemitism, not only failed to prevent its spread but turned a blind eye to it and eventually used it to legitimize itself. Cursed is a microhistory that recreates the events of the Kielce pogrom step by step and examines the dominant hypotheses about the pogrom through the prism of previously classified archival evidence. It offers readers a nuanced analysis that cuts across social and ideological divisions. The resulting narrative is filled with new discoveries not only about the Kielce pogrom but about the nature of antisemitism, hostility toward minorities, and collective violence. Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In 1872, a woman known only as "An Earnest Englishwoman" published a letter titled "Are Women Animals?" in which she protested against the fact that women were not treated as fully human. In fact, their status was worse than that of animals: regulations prohibiting cruelty against dogs, horses, and cattle were significantly more punitive than laws against cruelty to women. The Earnest Englishwoman's heartfelt cry was for women to "become–animal" in order to gain the status that they were denied on the grounds that they were not part of "mankind." In this fascinating account, Joanna Bourke addresses the profound question of what it means to be "human" rather than "animal." How are people excluded from political personhood? How does one become entitled to rights? The distinction between the two concepts is a blurred line, permanently under construction. If the Earnest Englishwoman had been capable of looking 100 years into the future, she might have wondered about the human status of chimeras, or the ethics of stem cell research. Political disclosures and scientific advances have been re–locating the human–animal border at an alarming speed. In this meticulously researched, illuminating book, Bourke explores the legacy of more than two centuries, and looks forward into what the future might hold for humans, women, and animals.
This book is the second in a three-part, multi-authored study of Polish American history which aims to present the history of Polish Americans in the United States from the beginning of Polish presence on the continent to the current times, shown against a broad historical background of developments in Poland, the United States and other locations of the Polish Diaspora. According to the 2010 US Census, there are 9.5 million persons who identify themselves as Polish Americans in the United States, making them the eighth largest ethnic group in the country today. Polish Americans, or Polonia for short, has always been one of the largest immigrant and ethnic groups and the largest Slavic group in America. Despite that, common knowledge about its social and political life, culture and economy is still inadequate – in Academia and among the Polish Americans themselves. The book discusses the major themes in Polish American history, such as organizational life and the structure of the community facing subsequent waves of immigration from Poland, its leadership and political involvement in Polish and American affairs, as well as living and working conditions, and the everyday life of families and communities, their culture, ethnic identity and relations with the broadly understood American society, starting from the outbreak of World War 2 in Poland in September, 1939, and ending with the highlights of the 21st-century developments. It depicts Polish Americans’ transition from a ‘minority’ through ‘ethnic’ group to Americans who take pride in their symbolic ethnicity, maintained intentionally and manifested occasionally. This volume will be of great value to students and scholars alike interested in Polish and American History and Social and Cultural History.
In one of the first scholarly book in English on Miron Białoszewski (1922–1983), Joanna Niżyńska illuminates the elusive prose of one of the most compelling and challenging postwar Polish writers. Niżyńska’s study, exemplary in its use of theoretical concepts, introduces English-language readers to a preeminent voice of Polish literature. Niżyńska explores how a fusion of seemingly irreconcilable qualities, such as the traumatic and the everyday, imbues Białoszewski’s writing with its idiosyncratic appeal. Białoszewski’s A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising (1977, revised 1991) describes the Poles’ heroic struggle to liberate Warsaw from Nazi occupation in 1944 as harrowing yet ordinary. His later prose represents everyday life permeated by traces of the traumatic. Niżyńska closely examines the topic of autobiography and homosexuality, showing how Białoszewski discloses his homosexuality but, paradoxically, renders it inconspicuous by hiding it in plain sight.
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