Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Greengrocer and His TV | 2010 | Paulina Bren | Buy |
| 2 | The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free | 2021 | Paulina Bren | Buy |
These are Paulina Bren’s two non-fiction books, published over a decade apart but both rooted in her expertise as a cultural historian. The Greengrocer and His TV (2010) looks at how television was used as a tool of state control in communist Czechoslovakia, while The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free (2021) tells the story of New York’s famous women-only residential hotel.
The Greengrocer and His TV draws on Bren’s deep knowledge of Central European history and references Vaclav Havel’s famous “Power of the Powerless” essay. It examines how ordinary Czechoslovaks interacted with state programming and what that tells us about daily life under communism. The Barbizon, by contrast, is a social history of the hotel that housed young women pursuing careers in New York from the 1920s onward, including future celebrities like Grace Kelly and Sylvia Plath.
Despite covering very different subjects, both books share Bren’s interest in how physical spaces and cultural institutions shape the lives of the people within them. The Barbizon was a New York Times bestseller and brought Bren’s work to a much broader audience beyond academia.