In the face of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, poet Zofia Ilinska (nee Bronski) and her mother, Helena Bronska, fled to England. For years they dreamed of going back to the Bronski house, which over time came to stand for everything they had lost. It was more than a half a century later that Ilinska returned to the village of her birth, asking Marsden to accompany her and entrusting to him Helena's diaries and letters. Best described as a non-fiction novel, the result is not only an account of the poet's quest for her origins but a portrait of the parallel lives of mother and daughter: coming of age, dramatic escapes, and love and loss. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This novel recreates the story of two Polish women, mother and daughter, the Russian revolution, and their escape from the Bolsheviks, Germans and partisans in an era that saw the destruction of an entire culture.

As the subject of ideological, aesthetic, and existential manipulations, the Polish home and its representation is an ever-changing phenomenon that absorbs new tendencies and, at the same time, retains its centrality to Polish literature, whether written in Poland or abroad. Framing the Polish Home is a pioneering work that explores the idea of home as fundamental to the question of cultural and national identity within Poland’s recent history and its tradition. In this inaugural volume of the Polish and Polish-American Studies Series, the Polish home emerges in its rich verbal and visual representations and multiple material embodiments, as the discussion moves from the loss of the home during wartime to the Sovietized politics of housing and from the exilic strategies of having a home to the the idyllic evocation of the abodes of the past. Although, as Bożena Shallcross notes in her introduction, “few concepts seem to have such universal appeal as the notion of the home,” this area of study is still seriously underdeveloped. In essays from sixteen scholars, Framing the Polish Home takes a significant step to correct that oversight, covering a broad range of issues pertinent to the discourse on the home and demonstrating the complexity of the home in Polish literature and culture.

Winner of the Stonewall Book Award in nonfiction The first comprehensive history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender America, from pre-1492 to the present "Readable, radical, and smart—a must read."—Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home Intellectually dynamic and endlessly provocative, this is more than a “who’s who” of queer history: it is a narrative that radically challenges how we understand American history. Drawing upon primary documents, literature, and cultural histories, scholar and activist Michael Bronski charts the breadth of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from 1492 to the present, a testament to how the LGBTQ+ experience has profoundly shaped American culture and history. American history abounds with unknown or ignored examples of queer life, from the ineffectiveness of sodomy laws in the colonies to the prevalence of cross-dressing women soldiers in the Civil War and resistance to homophobic social purity movements. Bronski highlights such groundbreaking moments of queer history as: • In the 1620s, Thomas Morton broke from Plymouth Colony and founded Merrymount, which celebrated same-sex desire, atheism, and interracial marriage. •Transgender evangelist Jemima Wilkinson, in the early 1800s, changed her name to "Publick Universal Friend," refused to use pronouns, fought for gender equality, and led her own congregation in upstate New York. • In the mid-19th century, internationally famous Shakespearean actor Charlotte Cushman led an openly lesbian life, including a well-publicized “female marriage.” • in the late 1920s, Augustus Granville Dill was fired by W. E. B. Du Bois from the NAACP’s magazine the Crisis after being arrested for a homosexual encounter. Informative and empowering, this engrossing and revelatory treatise emphasizes that there is no American history without queer history.

This collection of essays explores post-1989 Western perceptions of Eastern Europe and how these manifest themselves in cultural representations. It starts out from findings in the academic field of “post-socialism”, claiming that “Easterners” and “Westerners” are still very much under the influence of the socialisation they underwent during the Cold War and its aftermath. As a consequence, the revolutions of 1989 and 1990 and the subsequent opportunities for exchange did not necessarily bring about a reconciliation of the different worldviews. It seems the East-West divide has not simply vanished with the collapse of socialism. The essays included in this book examine in how far the divide is mirrored in the cultural arena. They focus on portrayals of post-1989 Eastern European political and social transformations in Western poetry, fiction, travel writing, autobiography, theatre and documentaries and investigate the West’s fascination with the “Wild East” and how outsiders view or have experienced Eastern life after the iron curtain was lifted.

This is the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and multilingual bibliography on "Women and Gender in East Central Europe and the Balkans (Vol. 1)" and "The Lands of the Former Soviet Union (Vol. 2)" over the past millennium. The coverage encompasses the relevant territories of the Russian, Hapsburg, and Ottoman empires, Germany and Greece, and the Jewish and Roma diasporas. Topics range from legal status and marital customs to economic participation and gender roles, plus unparalleled documentation of women writers and artists, and autobiographical works of all kinds. The volumes include approximately 30,000 bibliographic entries on works published through the end of 2000, as well as web sites and unpublished dissertations. Many of the individual entries are annotated with brief descriptions of major works and the tables of contents for collections and anthologies. The entries are cross-referenced and each volume includes indexes.