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Drawing on a rich trove of focus group data, interviews, and textual sources, Elaine Weiner's Market Dreams powerfully captures the varied responses of female managers and factory workers in the Czech Republic to their country's transition from socialism to capitalism. Her work, rooted in sociology and comparative feminism, is an important advance for the literature on women in Eastern Europe.

"Market Dreams is a conceptually-sophisticated and empirically-rich account of how the discourses and practices of the free market penetrated the hearts and minds of everyday Czech citizens. Weiner's provocative analysis takes readers inside the worlds of female factory workers to expose the discontinuities between their radiant market dreams and their everyday realities--and juxtaposes them to the continuities experienced by female managers. In the process, it challenges many of our ideas about post/socialism, marketization, and gender and reveals the enduring power of stories in shaping social identities and actions."
---Lynne Haney, Associate Professor of Sociology, New York University

"Through interviews and a careful analysis of newspaper articles written in the first decade after the collapse of state socialism, Weiner explores the complicated interconnections between personal stories and the emerging neoliberal metanarrative of the free market in the Czech Republic after 1989. Her book transcends many of the dichotomies with which researchers of post-state socialism have been struggling: 'East' vs. 'West,' losers and winners, emancipation vs. oppression, etc., and thus makes a truly novel contribution to our understanding of women's lives after state socialism."
---Éva Fodor, Assistant Professor of Gender Studies, Central European University

"Weiner's rich and innovative study of female Czech managers and workers exemplifies the importance of narrative analysis for understanding why gender and class have not (yet) reconfigured the sense of postcommunism's alternatives. This is critical reading for feminists, class analysts, and students of postcommunist social change."
---Michael Kennedy, Director, Center for European Studies, University of Michigan

Elaine Weiner is Assistant Professor of Sociology at McGill University. Visit the author's website at: www.mcgill.ca/sociology/faculty/weiner/.

Cover Credit: Frank Scherschel/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

A collection of essays and documents illuminating the work of Bohuslav Martinů, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival.

Bohuslav Martinů was one of the most extraordinary and prolific composers of the twentieth century. Martinů and His World offers a portrait of the composer in all his complexity. Born in the present-day Czech Republic, Martinů was rendered stateless as a result of events around World War II and the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia. He lived for more than a decade in the United States, where he had great success, and died in Switzerland.

Martinů composed more than four hundred works in all genres of instrumental and vocal music, and infused each with a special combination of the lyrical and the dramatic. Alongside an unerring sense of form, his works draw on a kaleidoscope of elements from such sources as Dvořák, American jazz of the 1920s, English Renaissance madrigals, the late Baroque concerto grosso, French Impressionism, Czech and Moravian folk songs, and the contemporary music of his day.

This volume pays special attention to Martinů’s little-known operatic works and presents for the first time both a recently discovered personal diary and a series of interviews with important figures who were part of his American years.

Martinů and His World reveals the composer as an essential voice of his time, an original thinker about music past and present, who lived through the political complexities of the twentieth century and stood up to them both as a human being and as an artist.