New Releases by Elena

Ilona Lakova''s darked skinned illiterate Gypsy father fell in love with her pale skinned Polish mother whilst a prisoner in Russia during the First World War. They returned to his mothers house in a Gypsy settlement on the edge of the village of Saris in Slovakia where their family of nine grew up, despised and mocked by the peasants on whom they depended for work. Ilona describes in simple unaffected language what it was like to be part of a tight knit community bound together by language, customs, music and a love of family, the spirit of Romipen.

A wartime memoir through the eyes of a Russian child.

Popular images of women in Mexico—conveyed through literature and, more recently, film and television—were long restricted to either the stereotypically submissive wife and mother or the demonized fallen woman. But new representations of women and their roles in Mexican society have shattered the ideological mirrors that reflected these images. This book explores this major change in the literary representation of women in Mexico. María Elena de Valdés enters into a selective and hard-hitting examination of literary representation in its social context and a contestatory engagement of both the literary text and its place in the social reality of Mexico. Some of the topics she considers are Carlos Fuentes and the subversion of the social codes for women; the poetic ties between Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Octavio Paz; questions of female identity in the writings of Rosario Castellanos, Luisa Josefina Hernández, María Luisa Puga, and Elena Poniatowska; the Chicana writing of Sandra Cisneros; and the postmodern celebration—without reprobation—of being a woman in Laura Esquivel''s Like Water for Chocolate.

The story of Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI. In this work of historical fiction, all of the characters were actual people The incidents, situations and conversations are based on reality. It is the story of the martyred King Louis XVI and his Queen, Antoinette. The fruit of years of research, the book corrects many of the popular misconceptions of the royal couple, which secular and modernist historians have tried so hard to promote. Louis and Antoinette can only be truly understood in view of the Catholic teachings to which they adhered and within the context of the sacrament of matrimony. It was the graces of this sacramental life that gave them the strength to remain loyal to the Church, and to each other, in the face of crushing disappointments, innumerable humiliations, personal and national tragedy, and death itself. Theirs is not a conventional love story; indeed it is more than a love story. The fortitude they each displayed at the very gates of hell is a source of inspiration for all Christians who live in troubled times. Hardcover, smythe-sewn, cream paper, 205 pages.

Bristol to Knoxville: A Postcard Tour takes us on a journey back to a simpler time, 1939, and invites us to tour the towns of East Tennessee by means of the picture postcard. The 1930s were fascinating years in America. It was a time of struggle, and yet of hope; of hardship, and yet of optimism. America fought her way through the Depression to emerge the better for it, and those who came through were determined to live the American dream. In 1939, as in previous decades, the postcard was a supremely popular means of fast and easy communication. Postcard companies sent their photographers all over America, to cities and crossroads alike. These photographers captured on film scenes that would prove popular commercially, but in doing so, they were unknowingly creating a tremendous archive of historical images that are of great value today for the insights they offer into the way life was lived in the early twentieth century.

The wife of the Soviet physicist and Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov tells the full, uncensored, harrowing story of their years in exile in the Soviet city of Gorky. "A testament to the resilience of love".--The Chicago Tribune. 16 pages of photos.

Now available in paper is Elena Poniatowska''s gripping account of the massacre of student protesters by police at the 1968 Olympic Games, which Publishers Weekly claimed "makes the campus killings at Kent State and Jackson State in 1970 pale by comparison."

Translation of dalla parle delle bambine.