It’s 1979 in Communist Czechoslovakia, ten years into the crushing period known as normalization, and Ludvík Vaculík has writer’s block. It has been nearly a decade since he wrote his powerful novel, The Guinea Pigs, and it was in 1968 that he wrote his anti-regime manifesto, Two Thousand Words, which the Soviet Union used as a pretext for invading Czechoslovakia. On the advice of his friend, the poet and surrealist painter Jiří Kolář, Vaculík begins to keep a diary, “a book about things, people, and events.” This marks the beginning of A Czech Dreambook.

Fifty-four weeks later, what Vaculík turns out to have written is a unique mixture of diary, dream journal, and outright fiction—an inverted roman à clef in which the author, his family, his mistresses, and the real leaders of the Czech underground play major roles. Undisputedly the most debated novel among the Prague dissident community of the 1980s, it is a work that Vaculík himself described as an amalgam of “hard-boiled documentary” and “magic fiction,” while Václav Havel called it “a truly profound and perceptive account. . . . A great novel about modern life and the crisis of contemporary humanity.”

A Czech Dreambook has been hailed as the most important work of Czech literature in the past forty years. And yet it has never before been available in English. Flawlessly translated by Gerald Turner, Vaculík’s masterpiece is a brilliant exercise in style, dry humor, and irony—an important portrait of the lives and longings of the dissidents and post-Communist elites.

In this unusual and important new work, Miroslav Vanek interviews twelve experts on oral history to discuss the medium’s current status within the social sciences in light of recent technology breakthroughs. Around the Globe addresses many of the challenges of oral history, from its inherent subjectivity to whether it should be treated as a discipline or simply a method for research. The interviewees also include their own accounts of how they began to study oral history, giving each section of the book a personal element that makes it a unique handbook for anyone using oral history in their research.  

The Sino-Tibetan language family is the second largest in the world, and standard Tibetan is the most widely spoken language in the Tibetic group. A comprehensive introduction to epistemicity in standard spoken Tibetan, this book examines the grammatical expression of a variety of epistemic modalities—rather, the myriad ways in which a speaker indicates their confidence in the knowledge on which their statement is based—through numerous examples of epistemic types. It elucidates the complex system of epistemic verbal endings and epistemic copulas, or connecting words, employed in the spoken language, analyzing them from semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic viewpoints.

The chronically homeless face a stark reality: lack of access to support systems, adequate shelter, and sustenance, with little hope for something better. For young people, however, life on the street may be merely a temporary stage in their lives. This book tells of homelessness among young people—the causes and their attitudes to the various problems they face.
           
Young homeless people describe a life in which they lose their privacy, the possibility to satisfy their basic needs, and, often, their self-respect in order to survive. The latter half of the book considers what happens when these young people return to society and how they navigate difficulties as they attempt to leave their past behind. Often, the struggle is not solely one of coping with the stigma of their experience; rather, they must face the legacies that linger long after their lives have turned a corner: drug addiction, criminal records, and accumulated debt.
           
Based on interviews with homeless people in Prague, Homelessness as an Alternative Existence of Young People paints an authentic picture of this social group and documents the often unseen social consequences of the transformation to capitalism from communism.