Kindle Price: $17.60

Save $1.39 (7%)

Promotions apply when you purchase

These promotions will be applied to this item:

Some promotions may be combined; others are not eligible to be combined with other offers. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions.

Read with our free app
You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.
Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

Buy for others

Give as a gift or purchase for a team or group.
Learn more

Buying and sending eBooks to others

  1. Select quantity
  2. Buy and send eBooks
  3. Recipients can read on any device

These ebooks can only be redeemed by recipients in the US. Redemption links and eBooks cannot be resold.
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Amazon book clubs early access
Loading your book clubs
There was a problem loading your book clubs. Please try again.
Not in a club? Learn more
Amazon book clubs early access

Join or create book clubs

Choose books together

Track your books
Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free.
Explore Amazon Book Clubs

Follow the author

Agata Pyzik
+ Follow
More books from this author
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West Kindle Edition

by Agata Pyzik (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
3.6 3.6 out of 5 stars 18 ratings
See all formats and editions
24 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe is as divided as ever. The passengers of the low-budget airlines go east for stag parties, and they go West for work; but the East stays East, and West stays West. Caricatures abound - the Polish plumber in the tabloids, the New Cold War in the broadsheets and the endless search for 'the new Berlin' for hipsters. Against the stereotypes, Agata Pyzik peers behind the curtain to take a look at the secret histories of Eastern Europe (and its tortured relations with the 'West'). Neoliberalism and mass migration, post-punk and the Bowiephile obsession with the Eastern Bloc, Orientalism and 'self-colonization', the emancipatory potentials of Socialist Realism, the possibility of a non-Western idea of modernity and futurism, and the place of Eastern Europe in any current revival of 'the idea of communism' – all are much more complex and surprising than they appear. Poor But Sexy refuses both a dewy-eyed Ostalgia for the 'good old days' and the equally desperate desire to become a 'normal part of Europe', reclaiming instead the idea an Other Europe.
,

,
Read more Read less
Previous page
  1. Print length
    310 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Zero Books
  5. Publication date
    March 28, 2014
  6. File size
    12345 KB
  7. Page Flip
    Enabled
  8. Word Wise
    Enabled
  9. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
  10. See all details
Next page
Due to its large file size, this book may take longer to download
Add a debit or credit card to save time when you check out
Convenient and secure with 2 clicks. Add your card

Editorial Reviews

Review

A necessary corrective to the paper-thin portrayal of Eastern Europe by Western media. Pyzik's writing is clear, direct, knowledgeable - and partisan, in the best sense of the word.
,
--Daniel Trilling, author of Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain's Far Right.

About the Author

Agata Pyzik is a Polish journalist who divides her time between Warsaw and London, where she has already established herself as a writer on art, music and culture for various magazines, including The Wire, Icon, Guardian, Afterall and Frieze.
,

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00IIWM686
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Zero Books (March 28, 2014)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 28, 2014
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 12345 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 310 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.6 3.6 out of 5 stars 18 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Agata Pyzik

Agata Pyzik

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

3.6 out of 5 stars
3.6 out of 5
18 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Russell Craig Richardson
2.0 out of 5 stars Newspaper articles, really, not quite a book.
Reviewed in the United States on June 20, 2018
Verified Purchase
After a promising recommendation by a friend, I admit to being rather disappointed by this book. There are a couple of interesting and informative chapters, but the whole enterprise seems rather hastily put together. I am not too concerned with typos and unbuckled sentences, normally, if the content is compelling enough to over-ride the inconvenience of having to re-read a phrase to get its gist, but there are two things at work here:
the first is the book is written in English by a person whose command of the language is less than stellar. It's very fluent, of course, but lacks a depth and variety that a decent editor could have mitigated. (I' d agree that it's better to have a slightly flat yet authentic account than a polished but 'written by committee' feel, but...) second, while the sense of most sentences is fairly clear, there are so many carry-over errors from Polish - particularly the use of articles in English vs Slavic languages - that the result is a very stop/start reading experience. All Slavs make errors with English articles, but Agata Pyzik seems to get about 75% wrong. This is a real problem. Added to which, while these inbuilt problems do not need to be crippling, they do show that the publisher simply did not proof the book. That's unforgivable. It leaves the author hung out to dry. the publisher could very easily have given the texts the once over by a competent editor and come up with an immensely better book. The third (and killing) problem is that after the first 4 or 5 chapters, the book looks more like a collection of articles written for other publications, with an unevenness of style and content (and an unpleasant ranting aspect to most of the writing) which not only reads badly, it undermines the author's liberal and legitimately angry stance.
Bets tactic? get hold of a copy and read a chapter in the bookshop. to the publisher: bloody well proofread your books for style and flow, not just spelling. To Agata Pyzik, maybe revise any later edition, and for your next book in English please get a friend to go over the flow and structure of the writing. Even Samuel Beckett had his French checked by his friends.
2 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
Ewa Kozela
3.0 out of 5 stars vibrant, emotional and exciting book but so chaotic that ...
Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2015
Verified Purchase
vibrant, emotional and exciting book but so chaotic that when I got to its half I had to put it away to settle some conclusions.
One person found this helpful
Helpful
 Report

Top reviews from other countries

giuviv
5.0 out of 5 stars ... (and fine) review by Sukhdev Sandhu of Agata Pyzik’s Poor but Sexy
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 21, 2014
Verified Purchase
One of the phrases that struck me from a very warm (and fine) review by Sukhdev Sandhu of Agata Pyzik’s Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes for the Guardian was his suggestion that a ‘sterner editor would have told Pyzik not to cover so many topics’ . Having read the review before I had time to read the book my first thought was ‘thank god in that case for lax editors’. Now having the read the book, too, my earlier feelings have been confirmed. In many ways I’m doubtful as to whether any British writer would have written such an intoxicating storm of a book confronting the reader with a new plethora of names and ‘unusual’ approaches giving one such an impressive ‘beyond the wall’ perspective. Upsetting all the ‘discourses’ that the Anglo-Saxon reader has been bombarded with from the likes of the Garton Ashes and Appelbaum’s as well an entire host of Eastern European liberals invited to feast at that sanctimonious collective of a generation of post-Soviet would-be sovietologists or transition theorists negotiating and guarding the frontiers of a new wall constructed on the ruins of the old one but this time built from the other side. A virtual wall (but in other ways an all too real one) of phobias and immigration laws, visa regimes and moral panics as well as the semi-orientalist cultural constructs and the reinvention of ruritania by the British ‘chattering classes’ (which goes for an intelligentsia in these isles) that have dominated the quotidian existence of many East European immigrants since 1989.

I suppose I should start off with a panegyric to the publishers of this work: Zero Books who seem to have succeeded in creating a new space (indeed new spaces) in the staid and stuffy English world of what goes for informed discussion and has brought another solid author in the guise of Agata Pyzik to include others like Federico Campagna, Mark Fisher and Owen Hatherley already in their catalogue. Hopefully a new group of opinion formers able to detonate the tired old world of ‘English letters’.

Agata Pyzik in her book Poor but Sexy has led a nuanced multi-thronged attack on those many voices that effectively end up serving us one and essentially the same picture of Eastern Europe or the Post-Soviet space. As Sandhu intimates in her Guardian article Pyzik avoids and provides antidotes to the Scylla of painting everything in the Eastern bloc with a sterile and dour brush and the Chabrydis of whitewashing history with ostalgic vulturism. While the most well-known commentators on the eastern bloc from the Garton Ash’s and the Appelbuam’s to the former liberal dissidents from the East made good such as Adam Michnik appear to be stuck needle-like upon a record played long ago, Pyzik reminds us that life in the Soviet bloc (and now in the post Soviet space) was a tad more complicated than the ‘informed public’ have been led to believe. Life may not have fitted the rosy and beatified social realist picture that propagandists tried to paint but neither did it fit in with the black and white canvas with which liberal anti-communists all too often sketched their denunciations of the old as well as their myopic insistence of ignoring the very great shocks and regressions of the neo-liberal new.

Fortunately for the reader of her work, Agata Pyzik is willing to paint on a very broad canvas in a fine eclectic way. As well as her critical and partisan stance, she leads the reader to consider a wide and conflicting variety of realities. All of the following subjects are covered substantially and not merely in passing: rock music, politics, art, fashion, cinema, philosophy, feminism, television shows as well as interspersing all this with a wide variety of historical and personal reflections on her role in the interstices of this ‘new Europe’ (a newly minted term that one can barely utter with a shudder recalling those coining this term). In covering these themes she unearths an extraordinary cast of what Sandhu aptly calls erased histories. They may be the erased history of David Bowie’s travels east or the erased histories of East German, Polish, Roumanian and even Soviet culture beyond the wall. In describing things there is a reflexiveness and ability to fix the traffic both ways that exaggerated histories of how the Beatles rocking the Kremlin never managed. Creatively recycling glimpses from the West, Eastern bloc cultures and subcultures were far more complex, radical and nuanced than any major writer has ever given them credit for. The canny troublemakers (another concise but accurate term borrowed from Sandhu’s review) pop up from one art form to another: such life stories never having come to people’s attention before in the Cold war years (and their aftermath): something kept secret (or not known about) by the stolid and staid old men and women of sovietology. Wicked parody (in the guise of the group Margot Liedertafel Honecker- an electronic rock group named after the wife of Erich Honecker) , irony, improvisation (in the guise of fashion writer Barbara Hoff) and the insanely surreal and even luridly subversive films of Chytilova and Zulawski mean that Pyzik has finally revealed an entire ‘lost Atlantis’ previously drowned in predictable Cold War discourses.

Pyzik’s interventions into many subjects come surrounded by an assuring lack of simple ‘position-taking’. Daniel Trilling gets its precisely right when he calls Pyzik’s book ‘partisan in the best sense of the word’. Partisan certainly but her partisan nature consists in expanding and extending the imagination of ‘our side’ (ie ‘the Left’). Her work doesn’t reek of the defensiveness of the Anglo-Saxon Left harking back to an imaginary 1945 rather than looking forward to an expanded, multi-national socialism of 2045. Yes, Pyzik may attempt to pick up some of the debris left behind in that great storm of history of the late twentieth century but she does so precisely where some of those ‘healthy germs’ lie (those very germs which Victor Serge spoke of when talking about that great and much-maligned experiment that 1917 could have turned out to be).

From a fruitful metaphor she uses at the end of the book (based on an anecdote by Boris Kagarlitsky) there arises a broader conception of the conundrum of Eastern and Western Europe in which tantalizingly it is as much the West that needs to ‘catch up’ with discovering the real East as it is the other way round. As Pyzik remembers Kagarlitsky putting it: Maybe we still can come up with ways to open things that you don’t and didn’t have to know about. And by revealing the healthy resistances and revolts and the uncannily radical utopian dreams that arose in the midst of 1917 and 1945 buried alike (as though in a strange conspiracy) in the accounts of both liberals and orthodox stalinists or neo-stalinists, we can re-insert those ‘healthy germs’ into historical reappraisals that can serve us to open up the twentieth century and, by doing so, hopefully open up the present moment.
7 people found this helpful
 Report
Dess
1.0 out of 5 stars More title work needed
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 22, 2021
Verified Purchase
This book didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know before and from before I remembered it better. After doing my best to read it carefully I became fully convinced that there is a typo in the title. The brave and flirty “Poor but sexy” simply doesn’t do any justice to the tedious, repetitive content.
For some reason it is divided by chapters and each chapter by sub chapters but I couldn’t understand what prompted it. No mater how this text is broken down it remains one same messy thing with no logical path to follow. I felt lost and in constant need of re-reading paragraphs as the book wasn’t taking me anywhere. Calling the writing “chaotic” as some reviewers suggested below and blaming it on the editor… seems just too much of a compliment. “Chaos” implies passion, deep sea while this book talks nothing but surface and not even handling this well. As already stated, towards the end I was convinced that there was a typo in the title. The meaning would had been so much better captured if it was called simply, “Poor And Unsexy”. But the good thing, after all, is that once again the desire to sound original proves more tricky than just calling it something catchy.
Report
Michael Bond
5.0 out of 5 stars A great read that gives you a fascinating peek behind the ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 12, 2015
Verified Purchase
A great read that gives you a fascinating peek behind the culture behind the Iron curtain that was hidden from us in the west for years behind the cultural propaganda that we were fed in the West.
2 people found this helpful
 Report
Dalrannoch
2.0 out of 5 stars Should be brilliant - but isn't.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 3, 2015
Verified Purchase
I really wanted to like this. I lived in Poland in the early 90s and live here again now so am interested in the subject. The book has flashes of brilliance and there were many interesting references that had me Googling films, books, bands etc. for further research. The problem is that it reads like a rambling mess. It seems every idea the author ever had has been thrown in randomly. I think it would have been better if it just stuck to Poland without the slapdash tour of the 'East'. Many ideas could be books in themselves. Often a topic is brought up more than once as if it was for the first time. The most annoying thing is that the editing is absolutely appalling. There are endless run on sentences that make no sense whatsoever, and there is at least one mistake (grammatical, spelling, typo) on every page (no exaggeration). It reads like a university student's essay that was handed in at the last minute without being checked. Whoever did the editing did the author a huge disservice because it takes a potentially great book down to annoying and mediocre. I really hope someone edits this properly to bring it up to the level the research and ideas deserve. Until then I don't recommend it.
9 people found this helpful
 Report
Bela
5.0 out of 5 stars Recommended
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 6, 2015
Verified Purchase
This is a truly an excellent book!
Report
Report an issue

Does this item contain inappropriate content?
Report
Do you believe that this item violates a copyright?
Report
Does this item contain quality or formatting issues?
Report