1903 W Michigan Ave, Kalamazoo, MI 49008

Phone: (269) 387-4860

For more information:  http://wmich.edu/english/events/frostic.html

About Raising Girls in Bohemia:

In the remarkable, personal, and political essays of RAISING GIRLS IN BOHEMIA: MEDITATIONS OF AN AMERICAN FATHER, writer and poet Richard Katrovas (Mystic Pig, Prague Winter), chronicles his life as a father of three Czech-American daughters. While tracing what fatherhood has taught him about the world, Katrovas delves in depth into a range of intricately-related, yet far-flung subjects including fine dining, sexual epithets, gender identity, racism, poetry, and education, tracing “the contours of his ignorance” about all things. Through the course of these fine essays, Katrovas unveils what it means to be an American and to be a man, and especially what it means to be a father of three daughters, born in Prague, in what we can only hope is the twilight of patriarchy. As award-winning author Stuart Dybek (I Sailed with Magellen), notes, ”Richard Katrovas vividly conveys the complexity of the relationship between a father and his bilingual daughters who are being raised as citizens of two very different cultures. The freshly written, deeply felt essays in Raising Girls in Bohemia, were fascinating when first published individually in literary magazines. But to read these essays together adds a welcome sense of an overarching narrative, and dials the level of complexity higher still. A vital, one-of-a-kind book.”

“RAISING GIRLS IN BOHEMIA is a brave meditation on the hazards and fleeting forms of happiness available to a navigator of two divergent cultures. The American poet and prose writer Richard Katrovas explores the fallout from his doomed marriage to a Czech woman, and in the process addresses his own complicated inheritance-—the ways in which his father’s long-term imprisonment shaped his childhood; his fierce love for his three daughters and inability to protect them from heartbreak; the difficulty he finds in entering into another language and life. In these wide-ranging essays, Katrovas examines the nature of freedom, the artist’s role in society, and the impossibility of ever really knowing someone, all with wit and wisdom. This is a wonderful collection.” –Christopher Merrill, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War

“The freshly written, deeply felt essays in RAISING GIRLS IN BOHEMIA, were fascinating when first published individually in literary magazines. Richard Katrovas vividly conveys the complexity of the relationship between a father and his bilingual daughters who are being raised as citizens of two very different cultures. But to read these essays together adds a welcome sense of an overarching narrative, and dials the level of complexity higher still. The result is a vital, one-of-a-kind book” –Stuart Dybek, I Sailed with Magellen

 

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