Confessions of a Transylvanian is a one-of-a-kind, backstage look at the greatest cult movie phenomenon of all time - the live Rocky Horror Picture Show - told by those who lived it. The highest-rated Rocky Horror book on the market, Confessions is a moving snapshot of life in a Rocky Horror cast that captures the grit, language and teenage angst of a group of fishnet-clad performers as they explore a world where the only rule was: Don't dream it. Be it.

Creeds and confessions throughout Christian history provide a unique vantage point from which to study the Christian faith. To this end, Donald Fairbairn and Ryan Reeves construct a story that captures both the central importance of creeds and confessions over the centuries and their unrealized potential to introduce readers to the overall sweep of church history. The book features texts of classic creeds and confessions as well as informational sidebars.

Comparative essays by an international panel of historians offer fresh insights into the unfolding of the Reformation across Europe. From Saxony to the Baltic to Transylvania, each chapter draws out the variables that shaped the spread of the Reformation across comparable geographic spaces, offering new perspectives on this epochal subject.

This volume will serve to enrich the reader’s understanding of the impact of World War I on Eastern Europe, by bringing together authors from all over Europe specialising in the history of this area. It presents a retrospective approach and a re-evaluation of this event, the lasting effects of which still make themselves felt in some regions today. Case studies, memoirs, journals, and the printed press of the time are all examined in order to paint a vivid picture of the Great War in Eastern Europe, and particularly in Romania. The chapters offer fresh perspectives on topics connected to the war, including the contribution of women and the emancipation opportunities for them, the social changes that occurred, and the propaganda in Romanian territory. They also review the League of Nations and the protection of international minorities, particularly in those regions where new boundaries were created, and where the application of national self-determination still left substantial communities outside the frontiers of the respective states.

Situated on the geographic margins of two nations, yet imagined as central to each, Transylvania has long been a site of nationalist struggles. Since the fall of communism, these struggles have been particularly intense in Cluj, Transylvania's cultural and political center. Yet heated nationalist rhetoric has evoked only muted popular response. The citizens of Cluj--the Romanian-speaking majority and the Hungarian-speaking minority--have been largely indifferent to the nationalist claims made in their names. Based on seven years of field research, this book examines not only the sharply polarized fields of nationalist politics--in Cluj, Transylvania, and the wider region--but also the more fluid terrain on which ethnicity and nationhood are experienced, enacted, and understood in everyday life. In doing so the book addresses fundamental questions about ethnicity: where it is, when it matters, and how it works. Bridging conventional divisions of academic labor, Rogers Brubaker and his collaborators employ perspectives seldom found together: historical and ethnographic, institutional and interactional, political and experiential. Further developing the argument of Brubaker's groundbreaking Ethnicity without Groups, the book demonstrates that it is ultimately in and through everyday experience--as much as in political contestation or cultural articulation--that ethnicity and nationhood are produced and reproduced as basic categories of social and political life.

**Washington Post Best Books of 2013** The celebrated TRANSYLVANIAN TRILOGY by Count Miklós Bánffy is a stunning historical epic set in the lost world of the Hungarian aristocracy just before World War I. Written in the 1930s and first discovered by the English-speaking world after the fall of communism in Hungary, Bánffy’s novels were translated in the late 1990s to critical acclaim and now appear for the first time in hardcover. They Were Counted, the first novel in the trilogy, introduces us to a decadent, frivolous, and corrupt society unwittingly bent on its own destruction during the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Bánffy’s lush depiction of an opulent lost paradise focuses on two upper-class cousins who couldn’t be more different: Count Balint Abády, a liberal politician who compassionately defends his homeland’s downtrodden Romanian peasants, and his dissipated cousin László, whose life is a whirl of parties, balls, hunting, and gambling. They Were Counted launches a story that brims with intrigues, love affairs, duels, murder, comedy, and tragedy, set against the rugged and ravishing scenery of Transylvania. Along with the other two novels in the trilogy—They Were Found Wanting and They Were Divided—it combines a Proustian nostalgia for the past, insight into a collapsing empire reminiscent of the work of Joseph Roth, and the drama and epic sweep of Tolstoy.

The “bulwark” or antemurale myth—whereby a region is imagined as a defensive barrier against a dangerous Other—has been a persistent strand in the development of Eastern European nationalisms. While historical studies of the topic have typically focused on clashes and overlaps between sociocultural and religious formations, Rampart Nations delves deeper to uncover the mutual transfers and multi-sided national and interconfessional conflicts that helped to spread bulwark myths through Europe’s eastern periphery over several centuries. Ranging from art history to theology to political science, this volume offers new ways of understanding the political, social, and religious forces that continue to shape identity in Eastern Europe.