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Wydawnictwo Marpress
In 2021 Wydawnictwo Marpress will celebrate its 30th anniversary which makes it the oldest publishing house in Gdansk, Poland with over 500 titles that have been published in more than 2 mln volumes. Our team consists of five experienced editors and sales and marketing specialists. We are looking for partners across the globe in order to sell the publishing rights of our best titles as well as for the unique authors and titles for our recently created Baltic series.
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September 2022Things I Didn't Throw Out
by Marcin Wicha
Marcin Wicha (1972) is a Polish designer, illustrator, columnist, and writer. Having written a few books for children, he turned to adult non-fiction with a personal slant, of which the present book is the second instance, after his debut, How I Stopped Loving Design, was published to popular and critical acclaim in 2015, also by Karakter. Things I Didn't Throw Out is told in short, anecdotal chapters, collected in three sections: „My Mother's Kitchen”, „Dictionary”, and „Laughing at Appropriate Moments”, and forms a loose diptych with How I Stopped Loving Design, which focused on Wicha's father in the aftermath of his death (both books work as stand-alones, too).The book is a first-person account of processing grief through the objects his mother, Joanna, surrounded herself with while living and dying. The first part is mainly devoted to Joanna's books and how they formed a part of her life in its various stages. The second is a series of stories about objects (such as her typing machine and her ballpoint pens), mementoes, phrases and words that were important in Joanna's life and which allow us to construct an image of her as a person, a mother and a Jewish woman living in Communist Poland. The third, shortest one is a stark, unflinching report of her final illness and death.Wicha meditates on the obsolescence of objects after their owner dies. The book is a collection of memories of a difficult person who lived in a difficult time – Wicha realistically describes the material meanness of the Communist regime, the shortages, rudeness and the hoarding instincts shaped by post-war reality. Joanna's Jewishness, her devotion to work, her argumentative temperament, the clarity and no-nonsense quality of her opinions - all that accumulates into a fully fleshed-out character whose decline and death is then described in terse, unsentimental, yet very touching scenes. The result is cathartic.In the first section, Wicha deconstructs the post-war history of Poland in a series of chapters which transform his mother's bookshelves into an almost geological accumulation of many decades of sediment. During his childhood, in times of economic crisis, he has to stage a long war of attrition with a bookshop sales assistant in order to buy the new Tove Jansson book. In a long chapter analysing the caustic wit of Jane Austen's Emma, Wicha describes his mother's passionate relationship with that book, which always consoled her in times of low mood, but couldn't do the trick after her husband's death. He looks for the background stories in the little doodles on the margin, the tiny hole on one page, finds the history of socio-economic transformation of 20th century Europe in his mother's cookbooks, and mentions his mother's jokey ambition to move to Canada, reflected by her English textbook.The second section has a broader context of politics and history. Wicha describes politics as an excuse not to talk about personal problems; his mother's was a life spent with politics in the foreground, because there was no other way. Wicha explores the common, generational trauma of March 1968, when the remaining Polish Jews, frequently hiding their identity, were subject to a campaign of intimidation and social cleansing. In chapters seemingly about trivia, Wicha writes about the legacy of a community of people which was annihilated – about how they continue to be present in tasteless jokes, awkwardly-worded memorial signs, allusions during family gatherings. This section shows incredible sensitivity to the layers of global, local and personal histories that add up and intertwine.In the third section the short chapters are untitled, which adds to the fragmentary nature of the text and the impression that Wicha is barely holding it together. In between conversations with his mother's live-in Ukrainian nurse, doctors, paramedics and his mostly non-responsive mother, Wicha attempts to carry on and make sense of what is happening, give it meaning. The last six short chapters deal directly with his mother's death; they encompass the formalities and banal details that he has to attend to, the unbearable pain and helplessness, the need to keep going. Thus concludes this archeology of love, exasperation and grief, not without moments of dark humour.The book would be perfect for readers interested in: exploring the parent-child relationship, especially (but not exclusively) at the end of the parent's life, and issues of processing grief and remembering, or reading an off-piste exploration of the 20th century history of the Jewish community in Europe. Things I Didn't Throw Out is a wry and unsentimental account of the emotional and physical labour of a carer and an attempt to understand one's parent as a person with their own history, personality and temperament independent of parenthood. It is also a nuanced portrait of a woman who refused to compromise and continued to demand respect, who was sensitive to language and the complexities of history, society and politics. Some comparisons might include Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk, Cathy Rentzenbrink's Last Act of Love and Brian Dillon's In the Dark Room.
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October 2022The Pavilion for Small Mammals
by Patryk Pufelski
“Noodle was one of the most important people in my life, despite weighing less than a kilogram and having four legs. I also think he was the only ferret in world history to visit every chapter of the Social and Cultural Association of Jews in Poland.” (page 17) The Pavilion for Small Mammals is the lightly fictionalised diary of contemporary Polish writer Patryk Pufelski. As a young, Jewish, openly gay zookeeper with a charming affinity for things past, his book offers answers to questions you didn’t know you had. How do you nanny a baby flamingo? Is being a vegetarian cyclist really enough to be an enemy of the Polish state? What does a friendship between a twenty-something-year-old, self-declared wannabe pensioner and an octogenarian Holocaust survivor look like? Spanning almost a decade, Pufelski chronicles his journey from dropping out of university to landing a zookeeping job of his dreams. He shares not only laugh-out-loud, self-deprecating anecdotes from his personal and professional life, but also offers moving pictures of his family history, the present-day Jewish community in Poland, and life as a queer person under a socially conservative government. All the while, animals leap off the page, not least pet ferrets, tarantulas and Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs. With seemingly effortless literary wit and endearing sensitivity to those around him – “all of them animals, some of them humans” – Pufelski’s Pavilion seems to be an effortless lesson on how the diary form can combine the personal with the political into an entertaining, heart-warming whole.
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August 2020Leila Means Night
by Aleksandra Lipczak
For eight centuries, southern Spain has been home to a multicultural political entity founded by the Arabs and co-created by Muslims, Jews and Christians. Medieval Cordoba, Seville and Toledo are bustling metropolises to which merchants, scientists and artists are drawn from all over the world. Here the first tracheotomy procedure is performed and astronomy is developed, here magnificent libraries are created, Greek philosophers are translated, multilingual poetry is written, and foreign policy at the Muslim court is directed by a Jewish diplomat.In a book stretched between history and modernity and between essay and reportage, the author deconstructs popular symbols of Spain (flamenco, mosaics, palm trees), revealing their Muslim-Arab roots. She shows how Andalusia today handles its heritage. Coexistence, the meeting of the so-called West with so-called Islam, the fluidity of borders, but also fundamentalisms, expulsions, exorcising others.... Al-Andalus is a palimpsest that is useful in thinking about the world today. Prizes: Nike Literary Prize 2021 - shortlist Witold Gombrowicz Prize 2021 - winner
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September 2024The Gray Hour
Time for a New Architecture
by Filip Springer
'I sometimes wonder why we talk so much about air travel, clothing chains, plastic straws and electric cars, and so little about buildings. Suffice it to say that the carbon footprint resulting from the construction, use and eventual dismantling of buildings accounts for around 40 per cent of global emissions,' writes Filip Springer in his latest reportage/essay. So it's time to ask how architecture should change in the face of environmental catastrophe. Should we be building at all? What kind of future are contemporary architects designing for us? What place should the environment have in design? Do we have the right to jeopardise our children's future for the sake of our own comfort? And finally, who does architecture serve? Springer takes a look at the practices of architects and urban planners, both those that are astonishing in their short-sightedness and those that are innovative and make us believe that a different, more world- and environment-friendly architecture is possible. He also examines whether even cautious but sensible visions of new architecture have a chance of breaking through in a world that is constantly chasing profit and growth.
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October 2023Word of Humour
by Olga Drenda
Are the jokes over?Who and what can we laugh at? Is it still possible to draw a thick line through satire? How long do memes live?Olga Drenda brings a sense of humour to her anthropological workshop. In this brilliant essay, she examines the various facets and contexts of humour, irony, abstraction and nonsense - from the Aesopian language of the communist era to the works of the cabaret scene, the language of advertising at the beginning of the Polsih transformation of the 1990s, stand-up, the memosphere and censorship.Drenda reflects on the relationship between humour and politics, because when things are cheerful all around, it is easy to turn a blind eye to the fact that a joke about an extremist has suddenly become an extremist's joke. She also shows that laughter can build a sense of solidarity and that a lame joke can sometimes be reassuring.
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Literature & Literary StudiesMay 2024Yesterday you were angry at green
by Eliza Kącka
I knew I always had to be ready for the wild, weird scenario. And that we had to stick together in it. This autobiographical prose is uncompromising and bravura. It is a story about the double experience of a certain otherness and of not fitting into a socially imposed framework. About the painstaking but beautiful process of building a difficult, non-obvious relationship. About being a mother and a daughter. About life leeway, performing the world and dredging up knowledge. About courage; about love. About living in a cocoon and emerging as a butterfly. About how much words can mean and what it's like to see them in colour.
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March 2015How I Stopped Loving Design
by Marcin Wicha
I wasted my childhood and youth. I didn't listen to the Rolling Stones or Depeche Mode. Graphic designers were my rock stars. At Piotr Wicha's house, slippers, pouffes and wall units are strictly prohibited. Export-rejected clogs make wooden noise with every step. Posters by Świerzy, Lego sets, father's drawing board and the recommendations column in a lifestyle magazine become carefully defended outposts in his war against the ugliness of Communist Poland. Then the architect's son becomes a designer. The political system changes. The chief enemy, however, is still the same, only clothed in more garish colours. 'Our logotypes are too small!', fret the clients. In the media emotions rank higher than facts, while discussions about colours give graphic designers heart attacks... 'Fall in love with design', entreat TV screens in Warsaw trams. Carefully planned space orders hotel guests around much more efficiently than security people. Whoever said that design was to make the world a better place? This collection of short, flamboyant texts resembles images in a caleidoscope, reflecting the esthetic face of Poland in the last forty years. It combines humour and erudition with a good dollop of literary talent. Marcin Wicha proves that design is by no means innocent. But even though designers often experience truly grotesque situations, their job never ceases to amaze and delight.
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Prose: non-fictionMarch 2023Mein Gott, How Beautiful
by Filip Springer
In May 1787, a ship with a secret cargo arrives in the port of Swinemünde. Moments later, the captain, Winfried Koschke, shows the first signs of madness. Shortly after returning from his great voyage to South America, the famous Alexander von Humboldt stands on top of the Rosengarten and says that he has one of the three most beautiful views in the world.This is not reportage. It's a half-fictional, half-documentary story in which the landscape is the main character. Travelling by bicycle through the territory of the eastern provinces of Prussia, later called the Recovered Territories, the author follows in the footsteps of people who, seized by a vision of progress, joined the industrial revolution and gradually transformed the world around them. Part of the story takes place on the Oder, Europe's first regulated river, and part in the forests of Prakwice, where Kaiser Wilhelm II, battling his own demons, wiped out the deer population.Springer looks at the landscape in the same way as 19th-century lithographers, the builders of the Prussian railway or the father of Polish photography, Jan Bulhak. In doing so, he tries to understand where this inescapable premonition of having been here once comes from.
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November 2021The Race Game
How Capitalism Divides to Rule
by Przemysław Wielgosz
We are used to interpreting racism as a set of stereotypes and prejudices. Przemyslaw Wielgosz offers a much deeper analysis of this phenomenon, looking for its roots in the long history of the birth and expansion of capitalism. In this fascinating book, he brings together two perspectives that have rarely been considered together: the local, relating to serfdom and the subsequent 'racialisation' of the working class in our part of Europe, and the global, relating to the development of slavery and the 'invention of race' in the North Atlantic basin. Moving freely between history and the present, drawing on studies in philosophy, sociology and economics, and - which gives the book its nerve - on familiar film images, the author shows how capitalism 'divides and rules', producing hierarchies and identity oppositions, and how it antagonises groups that could potentially oppose it together. On a global scale, according to the author, this role is played by Eurocentrism - in its various forms and disguises: the theft of history, Enlightenment philosophy, Orientalism, colonialism and culturalism.
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April 2020Forked Tongues
What Language Does to Our Brain
by Jagoda Ratajczak
When we speak a foreign language, are we ourselves? How are bilinguals different from dictionaries? Is the motivation to learn a language related to its effectiveness? Why is it so difficult to express feelings in another language? Can a foreign language be learned at any age?Jagoda Ratajczak's book is an unusual introduction to the world of language learning. With a sense of humor, the author introduces the mechanisms of language learning and dispels many myths about bilingualism. Giving examples from the literature on the subject and from her own experience - a person fascinated by learning foreign languages - she writes about how knowledge of other languages changes our way of thinking, feeling, looking at the world.
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August 2022Miedzianka. A History of Disappearance
by Filip Springer
Kupferberg - Miedzianka, a small town not far from Jelenia Gora, is gone. Just like there is no Town Hall Inn, where local ladies, gossiping at one of the tables, crooked in disgust as their husbands sang "If you had another mother-in-law, then...". Gone are the parties where Martin Lachmann played the saxophone and dancing couples whirled around. There is also no brewery, no paper mill, no masonry plant, no craft workshops. Gone are Mrs. Trenkler, who sewed shirts, Mrs. Assmann and Alex, who did bedding, Mrs. Bräuer, who traded in butter and eggs. There is no cemetery on the road to Mniszkow overlooking the Janowickie Ore Mountains, and the neighborhood still recalls how tombstones were pulled out of the ground with tractors and dogs dragged human bones all over the village. Filip Springer spent more than two years searching for answers to the question of why a town with a seven-century tradition disappeared from the face of the earth. Was it as a result of the damage caused by the plundering of uranium mining by the Russians conducted here between 1948 and 1952? Or were the tales of mining damage invented by the authorities as an excuse to demolish the town and hide a secret from the past?
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March 2012Ill-Born
Polish Post-war Modernist Architecture
by Filip Springer
Books and exhibitions like David Crowley’s Cold War Modern have shown that the architectural ideology of late modernism were a key front in the ideological war between the two sides of the iron curtain. In the countries of the former Soviet bloc that architecture has since ended up on the trash heap of history. Subsequent exhibits, books, and other publications defend or simply describe the art created under communism, including socialist modernism, which turned out simply to be “ill-born,” as Filip Springer’s terrific title suggests. With the innocent eye of someone born just seven years before Poland’s first free elections, this journalist and photographer examines monuments of a prior era and asserts that “after all, it’s good architecture.” Ill-Born is also a book of photography – made up of valuable archival items as well as new photographs by Springer himself – as well as a collection of reportage on these bastard-buildings. These two halves complement each other wonderfully. Beyond the stigmatized constructions themselves, Springer highlights the fates of the architects, thereby illuminating the reality of the Polish People’s Republic in a rich and nuanced light. Springer investigates what happens to the wartime generation, which sought out some local version of modernity. Particularly fascinating are their games with power. Filip Springer, then, places his emphasis on people, not on architecture. Nevertheless, the lives of the buildings since 1989 also emerge from among the pages of this book, in the rebuilding and fencing in of socialist spaces, in the ruination of their structures by new investors. The question remains open: are these artistically brilliant, modern symbols of the official style of “socialism with a human face” actually livable? (Max Cegielski, courtesy of the Book Institute)
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June 2016Spiritology
by Olga Drenda
The turn of the 1980s and 1990s told through the prism of objects and customs. Olga Drenda collects artefacts of the time of Polish transition: photographs, colour magazines and esoteric journals, calendars, advertisements, video cassettes, book covers. They are evidence of a reality in transition, of the coexistence of two cultural and aesthetic orders. They also reveal the dreams and aspirations of Poles who want to be modern and 'catch up with the West' at all costs. Fast food appears next to milk bars, television broadcasts the first commercials, people attend Kashpirovsky's spiritualist séances with flushed faces. The author does not succumb to nostalgia or irony when writing about the reality of those days. With anthropological sensitivity, she analyses what she has managed to document. The result is a fascinating record of everyday life in Poland during the transformation - something to read with bated breath and then reflect upon.
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Humanities & Social SciencesSeptember 2016HISTORY OF SCANDINAVIAN CULTURE. VOLUME 1 FROM THE PREHISTORY TO THE ENLIGHTENMENT
by Zenon Ciesielski
A two-volume monograph on the history of Scandinavian culture from an anthropological perspective, covering the areas of artistic, intellectual, socio-political, mythological-religious and technical-civilization culture. The concept of Scandinavia includes such modern countries as Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Finland, as well as the periphery consisting, among others, of Greenland, the Faroe Islands and Lapland.
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FictionNovember 2019Morkut
by Aleksandra Majdzinska
Like through a magnifying glass, the author observes the details of swept, overlooked, unnoticed matters that take place away from the main roads. Each story is a fate of an individual person determined by a great story or by small, everyday matters. Fourteen remarkably pictures that are worth stopping at.
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Children's & YAOctober 2018Fairy Tales from the Baltic Depth
by Agata Poltorak
A richly illustrated book about the fauna of the Baltic Sea for preschool and early school children. The fairy tales - although full of anthropomorphization and imaginary elements - smuggle many facts about the history, threats and ecology of the Baltic Sea. They have great educational potential and fill the gap in books for children related to the Baltic Sea. The author takes the children on a journey into the depths of the Baltic Sea. They will find out how it was created, meet many of its inhabitants and overhear what they are talking about when nobody is watching. They will also learn that many human behaviors affect the life of the sea, which should be remembered, for example, when relaxing on the seaside beaches. The story is presented in a friendly form of short fairy tales, in which the author skillfully weave information about the species of creatures inhabiting the Baltic Sea - their appearance, biology and habits, as well as how we can make their life near people easier and safer. The fairy tales are complemented by a small atlas at the end, with the help of which we will get to know our heroes even better. As the author writes: (...) “The book Fairy Tales from the Baltic Depth is the result of my passion for nature, cultivated since childhood, as well as the need to make up and tell fairy tales. I gained my love and respect for nature from my family home where I discovered the names of species, watched, admired and tried to understand. It didn't get over it with my age, nature still delights me, amazes me and makes me discover its secrets. The deep ecology trend with the theory of biocentrism is a great inspiration for me, I like to look at the world from the perspective where we - humans are not the most important, but just as important as other creatures. "
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March 2019Psychopomp
by Agatha Rae
Flannel shirt, walkman with batteries and Pearl Jam new tape - for Asia, twenty-years-old girl from Gdynia rock is not only a passion but also a remedium for the life turbulences. And she has her secondary school certificate, university entry exams and new love coming... In addition to all of this - her psychopom skills - which she discovers unexpectedly during one of the August night. It appears that Asia talks to death people and helps them to pass to the other side. How to reconcile a regular life and extraordinary skills? Will the down-to-earth teenager accept her gift?
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March 2020Kraboszki
by Barbara Piorkowska
Few times she had a headache then she fell in the street. It is how her journey through hospital halls started, where the main stations where: blood intake and chemo. Now she has to acquire rules of living with ilness and find her own way to recovery. Help in weaving a new line of life will come from an unexpected direction... Kraboszki is an intimate story of patient-physician relations and dehumanization in the healthcare. Based on real experiences, the novel allows you to see the emotional aspect of dealing with a terminal illness.
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December 2016HISTORY OF SCANDINAVIAN CULTURE. VOLUME II FROM ROMANTICISM TO THE END OF THE XX CENTURY
by Zenon Ciesielski
A two-volume monograph on the history of Scandinavian culture from an anthropological perspective, covering the areas of artistic, intellectual, socio-political, mythological-religious and technical-civilization culture. The concept of Scandinavia includes such modern countries as Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Finland, as well as the periphery consisting, among others, of Greenland, the Faroe Islands and Lapland.
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October 2018SLAVIC GODS AND DEMONS. FROM THE MANUSCRIPT OF BRONISLAW TRENTOWSKI
by Tadeusz Linkner
What attributes did Perun have? Who was Mokosz? How was Światowid presented? Which nation prayed to Wallach the most? What matters was Radagost responsible for? Where was Rugewit worshiped? Where does the habit of melting Marzanna come from? You will find the answers in this book. Tadeusz Linkner used the manuscript of Bronisław Trentowski, a romantic researcher of Slavic mythology. Trentowski was the first to systematize Slavic beliefs in such an original way. His work, The Slavic Faith, or the Ethics Seizing the Universe, was never published. Here we have the opportunity to meet over three hundred Slavic gods and demons.
