Search results for ""Author Bill Johnston""

The Noonday Cemetery & Other Stories, selected by Herling himself shortly before his death in 2000, is a collection of thirteen brilliant stories spanning the last twenty years of his life. His novel The Island was published to great acclaim in 1993, and his memoir, A World Apart, is among the most powerful accounts of life in the Soviet gulag. Volcano and Miracle, published in 1996, contains short fiction and prose writings from his Journal Written at Night. But nowhere before have Herling's best stories—and Herling was indeed a master of the short story—been compiled and published in English translation. In "The Noonday Cemetery," an eerie graveyard on an Italian hillside overlooks the sea and hides the secrets of a murder (or suicide?). "Beata, Santa" describes the plight of a young Polish woman raped by Serbs, who is pressured by the Catholic Church to keep her child. In "A Madrigal of Mourning," a Russian woman musicologist becomes obsessed with Carlo Gesualdo (1560-1613), Prince of Venosa, a madrigalist and murderer. These timeless stories, dealing with moral, often historical, subjects and written in passionate, deeply affecting prose, affirm without a doubt the assessment by The Boston Globe that Herling is "a writer of stylistic mastery and moral depth, who deserves to be placed among the best in any language."

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"Although the past is a constant theme in Rózycki's work, the present erupts with no less urgency . . . he witnesses the ant-like unimportance of human beings viewed from a cosmic perspective."—Helen Vendler, Harvard University The hero of the mock poem, Grandson, leaves his hometown of Opole, in the western Polish region of Silesia, to organize a family reunion in the Ukraine where his family had lived before World War II—before being forcibly resettled along with many thousands of other Poles. In this, his sixth book, Tomasz Rózycki talks back, both to history and to important literary predecessors such as Czeslaw Milosz and Adam Mickiewicz, in language that is as playful as it is masterful. Twelve Stations is a masterful work of contemporary world poetry by one of its most outstanding practitioners. In 2004 Twelve Stations won the prestigious Koscielski Foundation Prize and was named best Book of the Spring 2004 by the Raczynski Library in Poznan and its translator Bill Johnston received the 2008 Found in Translation Award. Tomasz Rózycki also has received the Krzysztof Kamiel Baczynski Prize (1997), the Czas Kultury Prize (1997), The Rainer Maria Rilke Award (1998), and the Joseph Brodskie Prize from Zeszyty Literackie (2006), and has been nominated twice for Poland's most prestigious literary award, the NIKE Prize (2005 and 2007).

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Fiedorczuk was inspired by her readings of the original Hebrew Psalms, as well as by the process of learning to sing. In her poems she captures the heartache and joy of the Biblical Psalms, but in the context of modern life.

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Explorations of humans in the natural world using tender, sometimes erotic, always moving language. Julia Fiedorczuk entangles images and concepts from science (astronomy, physics, and biology) with deeply personal explorations of relationships and connectedness in her debut poetry book in English. Nature abounds in these poems, and Fiedorczuk is, in turn, ever present in "that luscious fruit, the world." Her passionate engagement with the details of the environment and the people in it makes hers an unforgettable voice in contemporary ecopoetics, one that argues for empathy and alertness. She has published five volumes of poetry, three of fiction, and three books on ecocriticism, and won several Polish literary awards.

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In an anonymous French village a child loves to wander a forest where his mother may have disappeared. His father is speechless with anger; his grandmother is concealing her own story.

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Birds have inspired people since the dawn of time. They are the notes behind Mozart's genius, the colours behind Audubon's art and ballet's swansong. In The Birds They Sang, Stanislaw Lubienski sheds light on some of history's most meaningful bird and human interactions, from historical bird watchers in a German POW camp, to Billy and Kes in A Kestrel for a Knave. He muses on what exactly Hitchcock's birds had in mind, and reveals the true story behind the real James Bond. Undiscouraged by damp, discomfort and a reed bunting's curse, Lubienski bears witness to the difficulties birds face today as people fail to accommodate them in rapidly changing times. A soaring exploration of our fascination with birds, The Birds They Sang opens a vast realm of astonishing sounds, colours and meanings - a complete world in which we humans are never alone.

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A towering achievement in European literature, Pan Tadeusz is the central work of the Polish literary canon, heralded for its lovingly detailed recreation of a bygone world. The traditions of the Polish gentry and the social and natural landscape of the Lithuanian countryside are captured in verse of astounding beauty, simplicity, and power. Bill Johnston's translation of this seminal text allows English-language readers to experience the richness, humour, and narrative energy of the original.

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There has been a growing interest in Polish literature in the past decade, but only a tiny number of titles are available in English, particularly of Polish poetry. This is the third in Zephyr Press' New Polish Writing series, which came out of our anthology "Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird: Poetry from Poland"(2004). The book will include a critical introduction to place Dycki's poetry in a larger context of contemporary Polish poetry. According to the Internet, there are almost 70 colleges and universities in the US offering Polish studies, 83 offering Slavic Studies, and 66 cities that have a sizable Polish or Polish-American community.

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One morning the beautiful Ichrak is found murdered in a street in Casablanca. All the men feared her as much as they desired her . . . . In a city buffeted by the Chergui, a violent wind emanating from the Sahara, the investigation becomes a prism through which a group portrait of a working-class district emerges.In Casablanca Story, In Koli Jean Bofane trains his razor-sharp observations of a bitter reality and his mordant humor on corruption among the powerful, shady property deals, and the vulnerable situation of migrants and male sexual desire, and he succeeds in transforming a desperate contemporary reality into engrossing and entertaining fiction.Following on from Congo Inc., In Koli Jean Bofane shifts his geographical focus to outline a vision that encompasses both north and sub-Saharan Africans: Africa is moving forward and is the equal of the other continents or, to put it another way, Africa is no better than they are.

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