Hasek was a humorist and satirist of rare order long before he wrote his celebrated novel, The Good Soldier Schweik. This selection of 32 pre-1914 stories of Prague life-most were translated into English for the first time in this collection-revels i

This book is a description of the process of constructing a productive Other for the purpose of being admitted to Canada as a Convention refugee. The whole claiming procedure is analyzed with respect to two actual cases, and contextualized by reference to pertinent national and international jurisprudence. Since legal analysis is deemed insufficient for a complete understanding of the argumentative and discursive strategies involved in the claiming and “authoring” processes, the author makes constant reference to methodologies from the realm of literary studies, discourse analysis and interaction theory, with special emphasis upon the works of Marc Angenot, M.M. Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieu, Erving Goffman, Jürgen Habermas and Teun van Dijk. In so doing, he illustrates a reductive movement that inevitably occurs in legal argumentation which results in the displacement the subject from the realm of “refugee claimant” to that of claimant as “diminished Other.”

From a bestselling historian, a daringly revisionist history of World War I The Pity of War makes a simple and provocative argument: the human atrocity known as the Great War was entirely England's fault. According to Niall Ferguson, England entered into war based on naive assumptions of German aims, thereby transforming a Continental conflict into a world war, which it then badly mishandled, necessitating American involvement. The war was not inevitable, Ferguson argues, but rather was the result of the mistaken decisions of individuals who would later claim to have been in the grip of huge impersonal forces. That the war was wicked, horrific, and inhuman is memorialized in part by the poetry of men like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, but also by cold statistics. Indeed, more British soldiers were killed in the first day of the Battle of the Somme than Americans in the Vietnam War. And yet, as Ferguson writes, while the war itself was a disastrous folly, the great majority of men who fought it did so with little reluctance and with some enthusiasm. For anyone wanting to understand why wars are fought, why men are willing to fight them and why the world is as it is today, there is no sharper or more stimulating guide than Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War.

Few historians have written about walking, despite its obvious centrality to the human condition. Focusing on the period 1800-1914, this book examines the practices and meanings of walking in the context of transformative modernity. It boldly suggests that once historians place walking at the heart of their analyses, exciting new perspectives on themes central to the ‘long nineteenth century’ emerge. Walking Histories, 1800-1914 adopts a global perspective, including contributions from specialists in the history and culture of Great Britain, North America, Australia, Russia, East-Central Europe, and South Asia. Critically engaging with recent research, the contributions within offer fresh insights for academic experts, while remaining accessible to student readers. This book will be essential reading for those interested in movement, travel, leisure, urban history, and environmental history.

The book is a novel-interview initiated by the Hungarian journalist, writer and anti-communist activist based in Slovakia László Szigeti. It retains the character of a more or less verbatim oral record - it is full of false starts and thematic and syntactic digressions, characteristic for the majority of Hrabal´s magical, bizarre and grotesque tales. It is unique for being autobiographical and for making the reader understand Hrabal´s personality, his philosophy and perception and understanding of Central Europe shortly before the fall of totalitarian regime in the late 80s.

Praise for the print edition:"...a useful and engaging reference to the vast world of the novel in world literature."

In recent years, there has been a continuing and persistent world-wide interest in the interaction between the two disciplines of law and literature. Although there have been many collections of primary texts that combined these two areas, this volume presents literary analyses and criticism in an attempt to assess the varied relationships between law and justice, between lawyers and clients, and between readers’ perceptions and authors’ intent, hopefully suggesting why they have continually been yoked together. One similarity between the two is that lawyers, like writers, must catch their audience’s attention by novelty of scene, distinctiveness of voice, and ingenuity of design. Furthermore, legal advocates must recreate a concrete sense of reality, developing vivid and valid pictures of a specific time and place. In short, both lawyers and writers attempt to provide a basis for juries / readers to judge defendants / characters by their motivations and their actions and to decide whether a favorable ruling / assessment is justified. Collectively, the essays in this book are designed to deal with themes of guilt and innocence, right and wrong, morality and legality. The essays also suggest that the world as it is delineated by lawyers is indeed a text that like its literary counterparts sometimes blurs the distinction between fact and fiction as it attempts to define “truth” and to establish criteria for “impartial” justice. By exploring interdisciplinary contexts, readers will surely be made more aware, more sensitive to the roles that stories play in the legal profession and to the dilemmas faced by legal systems that often succeed in maintaining the rights and privileges of a dominant societal group at the expense of a less powerful one.