Paulina Bren

Academic Books

Paulina Bren’s book, The Barbizon, will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2020.  It will also be coming out in the U.K. with Two Roads, and in Italian translation with Neri Pozza.  The Barbizon tells the story of New York’s most glamorous women-only hotel, and the women—both famous and ordinary—who passed through its doors from the 1920s to the present.  It is at once a social history of women, ambition, and Manhattan.

Paulina Bren has also written two successful books about communism and everyday life.  Prior to her work, no one was writing about the 1970s and 1980s in the Eastern Bloc, and her books helped carve out a new field of study.


ACADEMIC BOOKS

Before The Barbizon and She-Wolves, Paulina wrote academic books and articles about everyday life behind the Iron Curtain, including The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the Prague Spring, published by Cornell University Press, which won the Council for European Studies Book Prize, the Austrian Studies Association Book Prize, and was short-listed for the 2011 Wayne S. Vucinich Prize. With Mary Neuburger, professor at UT Austin, she also co-wrote and co-edited Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe, published by Oxford University Press.

 
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The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring

Winner of the Council of European Studies Book Prize
Winner of the Austrian Studies Association Book Prize
Shortlisted for the Vucinich Book Award

Reviews:

Times Literary Supplement: “splendid”

Slavic Review: “path breaking and thought-provoking”  

The English Historical Review:  “a witty and thought-provoking analysis of Czechoslovak culture during ‘Normalisation’”

Journal of Social History:  “In this provocative book, Paulina Bren brings to life the ‘stagnant’ decades of ‘nothingness’ that followed the 1968 Prague Spring.”

Also translated into Czech:

Zelinář a jeho televize: Kultura komunismu po pražském jaru 1968

Media: “The Greengrocer and His TV” — New Books Network, February 2015

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Communism unwrapped: Consumption in Cold war eastern europe

Reviews:

AHY: “one of the best collections I have ever had the pleasure of reading”

European Journal of Communication:  “a rich and fascinating collection”

"This rich collection of essays offers a unique look at post-1945 Eastern Europe. Departing from the Cold War narrative of endemic shortages and the gloominess of daily life under communism, the essays highlight the everyday creativity and agency of ordinary people… Situating these stories in the context of transnational modernity rather than a totalizing party state, the book offers a rare combination of new research and a compelling theoretical insight."--Malgorzata Fidelis, University of Illinois at Chicago