In The Bohemian Flats, Mary Relindes Ellis’s rich, imaginative gift carries us from the bourgeois world of fin de siècle Germany to a vibrant immigrant enclave in the heart of the Midwest and to the killing fields of World War I. Shell shock, as it was called, lands Raimund Kaufmann in a London hospital, a victim of the war but also of his own, and his brother’s, efforts to get out of Germany and build a new life in America. While his recovery eludes him, his memory returns us to Minneapolis, to the Flats, a milling community on the Mississippi River, where Raimund and his brother Albert have sought respite from the oppressive hand of their older brother, now the master of the family farm and brewery. In Minnesota the brothers confront different forms of prejudice, but they also find a chance to remake their lives according to their own principles and wishes—until the war makes their German roots inescapable. Following these lives, The Bohemian Flats conjures both the sweep of irresistible history and the intimate reality of a man, and a family, caught up in it. From a nineteenth-century German farm to the thriving, wildly diverse immigrant village below Minneapolis on the Mississippi to the European front in World War I, and returning to twentieth-century America—this is a story that takes a reader to the far reaches of human experience and the depths of the human heart.

The Bohemian Flats, first published in 1941, is a charming history of a small, isolated community that once lay on the west bank of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, tucked underneath the Washington Avenue bridge. From the 1880s to the 1940s the village was home to generations of Swedish, Norwegian, Czech, Irish, Polish, and especially Slovak immigrants. This book's vivid descriptions of their traditions and adaptations offer an unusual insight into Minnesota's multi-ethnic heritage. The Bohemian Flats discusses the early years of settlement on the Flats, the lifeways and celebrations of the residents, and the razing of most of the neighborhood in 1932; it also provides recipes "From the Flats Kitchens." This edition contains a new section of pictures of the Flats and an introduction by ethnic historian Thaddeus Radzilowski, who describes the genesis of the book in the WPA and answers more questions about the identities of those who lived on the Bohemian Flats.

Describes the various subcultures trying to reshape America today, and includes interviews with modern bohemians, who share their views on life.

Shantyboat is the story of a leisurely journey down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. For most people such a journey is the stuff that dreams are made of, but for Harlan and Anna Hubbard, it became a cherished reality. In their small river craft, the Hubbards became one with the flowing river and its changing weathers. This book mirrors a life that is simple and independent, strenuous at times, but joyous, with leisure for painting and music, for observation and contemplation.

The first novel, in revised form, from "possibly the best living writer in Britain" (The Daily Telegraph) In The Colour of Memory, six friends plot a nomadic course through their mid-twenties as they scratch out an existence in near-destitute conditions in 1980s South London. They while away their hours drinking cheap beer, landing jobs and quickly squandering them, smoking weed, dodging muggings, listening to Coltrane, finding and losing a facsimile of love, collecting unemployment, and discussing politics in the way of the besotted young—as if they were employed only by the lives they chose. In his vivid evocation of council flats and pubs, of a life lived in the teeth of romantic ideals, Geoff Dyer provides a shockingly relevant snapshot of a different Lost Generation.

By 1880, London, capital of the largest empire ever known, was the richest, most populous city in the world. And yet it remained an overcrowded, undergoverned city with huge slums gripped by poverty and disease. Over the next three decades, London began its transformation into a new kind of city - one of unprecedented size, dynamism and technological advance. In this highly evocative account, Stephen Iinwood defines an era of unique character and importance by delving into the lives and textures of the booming city. He takes us - by hansom cab, bicycle, electric tram or motor bus - from the glittering new department stores of Oxford Street to the synagogues and sweat shops of the East End, from bohemian bars and gaudy mushc halls to the well-kept gardens of Edwardian surburbia. 'Essential reading for the scholar, the historian and the lover of London. ..He is equally at home with the grand sweep and the human detail, always supported by immaculate research...Inwood can throw off with elegant ease a concise explanation of technicalities that the reader was vaguely aware of not understanding and perhaps meant to look up sometime.' Liza Picard Financial Times Magazine

The Turtle Warrior is the story of the Lucas family, who live in a beautiful and remote part of Wisconsin inhabited by working-class European immigrants and the Ojibwe. By 1967 the Lucas farm has fallen into disrepair, thanks to the hard drinking of John Lucas, who brutalizes his wife and two sons. When the eldest, James, escapes by enlisting to fight in Vietnam, he leaves young Bill alone to protect his mother with only his own will and the spirit of his brother to guide him. Beautifully written and deeply felt, The Turtle Warrior takes readers from the heartland of America to the battlefields of World War II and Vietnam weaving a haunting tale of an unforgettable world where the physical and spiritual, the past and the present, merge.

Praised unflinchingly by Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein, this stunning work, first published in 1933 by the Obelisk Press, Paris, is a non-judgemental depiction of gay life and men who earn their living there, told through characters like Julian (modeled on Ford) and Karel (based on Tyler).

'Who wants to be the same as everyone else? You don't want to be ordinary, do you?' Tom always imagined he was adopted. At 17, he flees ordinariness in small-town Australia for Melbourne and a run-down block named Cairo. There he meets Max Cheever. Enigmatic, artistic, anarchic: Max liberates Tom into a new world - of first love, first crimes - and the greatest art heist of the twentieth century. This is his family now. But of all this summer's lessons, the cruellest will be telling what is real from what is fake.