Ana was born in Zagreb in 1974 to a Croatian arts world power couple - actress / painter Jagoda Kaloper and architect Radovan Tajder. She grew up in Zagreb, ballet dancing, acting in movies, painting (first on the walls of her parents’ apartment, later at the School of Fine Arts) and going to rockabilly parties.
In 1991, she moved to Vienna where she has lived ever since. She studied at Webster University, first graduating with a BA in Marketing Management and then an MBA. During her MBA studies, Ana started working at the Croatian Mission to the UN where she spent four years learning about the art of diplomacy. Armed with her MBA diploma, she moved to Mobilkom Austria, the region’s largest mobile network operator, to pursue a career in international business. In the next six years she worked her way up from project manager to international marketing specialist. Then the urge to explore new fields took her to Ogilvy & Mather, one of the world’s largest advertising agencies, where she worked as key account manager.
At work, Ana shook hands with presidents and ministers, managed large-scale events and projects, coordinated marketing activities in five different markets, devised international strategic market plans, launched websites, and oversaw online campaigns. And to keep sane through all of this, she danced, practised tai-chi, travelled, read countless books, visited exhibitions, concerts and operas. And partied. A lot.
In 2004, Ana put pen to paper and started to write short stories based on her varied work, travel and romantic adventures. “From Barbie to Vibrator”, a collection of these fascinating accounts - sometimes funny, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes poignant but always enlightening - was published in May 2008 by Profil, Zagreb.
Ana is currently working on her second book and writing for The Vienna Review and Zaposlena (a Croatian magazine for business and professional women). She is about to start her PhD at the University of Vienna.
Sex and the City 2 opens in European cinemas on Friday, May 29. I, as the ultimate S&C fan should be ecstatic. Well, I’m not. I passed by a cinema with a jumbo poster above the door featuring Carrie, Charlotte, Samantha and Miranda (in a desert?!) and I had a very strange feeling – it was a bit like looking at a corpse – a mixture of curiosity, disgust and sadness.
Finally it is my time to brag about Facebook! Our love relationship has turned into a love-hate relationship. I like(d) social networks: I am home in two different countries. I went to an international school and then an international university. Later, I worked in international business, so my friends are scattered all around the world. For people like me, the social networks are the easiest way to keep in touch.
is a living proof that it is never too late. Her life is a story of contradictory realities: of being a housewife and a celebrated scholar, a victim of anti-Semitism and a powerful women’s rights advocate, at times prosperous and at times poor.
It was “Bloomsday” evening, Jun. 16 at Café Korb. Yet another book reading, I feared – the intoning of Literature with a capital “L” – but instead, it was a colorful café-fairground of contrasting scenes and people. James Joyce would have loved it.
Students of the University of Vienna are used to many things – like having to arrive at lectures an hour early to get a place to sit! Otherwise it’s the floor. But what they are definitely not used to are TV-crews, mics, flashes and cameras taking over their lecture halls.
For Alice Schwarzer’s visit, however, that’s just what they got.
Vienna Review book review editor Ana Tajder’s first novel From Barbie to Vibrator is a female coming-of-age story set in Vienna’s 8th district. Already published in her home country of Croatia, the book will be published this month in German by Czernin Verlag.
Last month, Frederic Morton was again in Vienna, the city of his birth that has long been his muse and continues to be the focus of his work. On this particular visit, he attended the opening night of the musical Rudolph, playing at the Raimundtheater, the story of the Crown Prince’s last eight months leading up to the presumed double suicide with his lover at Mayerling, his hunting lodge in the Vienna Woods.
Reading the blurb on the back of Hollywood to Vienna: a Trip and a Half, you might expect a book about cultural differences between sunny California and fog-bound Middle Europe. Instead, you find a Bildungsroman of the sixties counter-culture told in flash-back by one of its own. Jesse is a middle-class Jewish boy who grew up in LA and while nobody special, he goes to school with the children of Hollywood stars. A teenage hippie, his search for love and peace ultimately take him to Vienna where he meets Anna, the young Austrian woman he will later marry.
As of Jan. 7, 680 people have been killed in the Israeli attack on Palestine, CNN tells us. This number make me angry. Not because it is high, but because it means… well, nothing.
Numbers do not describe suffering. What do you do with this information? What does 680 tell you? Does this mean the conflict is bad? Or not so bad? We are constantly bombarded with so many numbers that they already made us numb…. Tens of Millions died in WWII, 110,000 in Bosnia and Croatia; 2,974 in the World Trade Center. And now there is 680…
When it comes to living parallel lives, few have outdone attorney and novelist Louis Begley.
Begley was a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton, a distinguished New York Law firm, when he surprised the literary world with his first novel, Wartime Lies, about a young Polish Jew caught up in the inferno of the Holocaust.
The pace of events surrounding the agonies of the British Bookshop last autumn was worthy of a Hollywood thriller. On Nov. 17 2008, Vienna’s book lovers were shocked to learn that The British Bookshop, the city’s largest and oldest English-language bookstore, had filed for bankruptcy. And then, just as the ink was drying on the “end of an era” eulogies for a beloved literary institution, they heard the breaking news:
In 1968, my mother was at the barricades. She tried to change the world. And I? Where was I at her age? I was at the top floor of a multinational corporation. And all I was trying to change was the amount of money in my bank account.
Who are we, the children of the 1968 generation? Are we just a bunch of cynical, egoistic, lobotomised consumers? Or is there an idealistic spark hidden somewhere deep under the Prada logo, waiting to start changing the world?
Here are sneakers with a very interesting story. Believe it or not: Sneakers as a symbol of a socio-political transition. Once worn by masses of Titos's pioneers, these sneakers are now worn by insiders of the European fashion scene. And here is a man who gave the sneakers their well deserved makeover: Mauro Massaroto. Mr.
Will you be celebrating Valentine’s Day? Will you buy roses, go for a dinner in a luxurious restaurant, buy a little teddy bear with a big red heart? Or will you boycott that kitschy capitalistic product of American culture, condemning it as crass celebration consumption?
Or will you simply be ambivalent?
Well, don’t be. As Eva Illouz shows in her two books about the impact of capitalism on romance and love, the topic is too interesting for ambivalence.
Every now and then, a little trip back to childhood can be eye-opening. This is what Disney DVDs are just perfect for: One and a half hours of magic and innocence. That is, if the grown-up inside will allow it. There is a serious danger that the grown-up grew too cynical and will try everything possible to ruin the back-in-the-childhood journey. And the best way to ruin a fairy tale is trying to imagine how the oh-so-magical story, let’s take Snow White, would look in real life. Or even better – in today’s real life.
I don’t get it. What is going on? Revolutionary things I was “whispering” to the readers of my blog only a few months ago — you know, the stuff about saving the world — are now echoing across the globe from people like the U.S. Treasury Secretary and the British Prime Minister; from Chancellors, Presidents and President-Elect, even Nobel Prize winners.
The music video showed two black rappers jumping around an opulent Schloss and a couple of hot babes dancing around their Ferraris. Two more seconds and I was going to puke. I'm fed up of those fragments of perfect lives, thrown at me wherever I look, puzzle pieces of immaculately styled projections. The trick, though, is that in a normal puzzle, hundreds of meaningless little fragments come together to make a big picture.
But this is the opposite. This is hundreds, thousands of perfect sexy little images, which, if we ever could put them together, would only show us the horror of the plastic world we are living in.
'I am dead,' she said as she hung up the receiver.
'What,' I asked in astonishment?
'I am dead,' she repeated. 'And have been for 7 years.' At least according to the morning edition of Jutarnji List, Croatia's largest circulation daily, she had died on Oct. 26, 2000. All day, the phone wouldn't stop ringing. Friends where calling to say they had just read she was dead. Some called to make sure she wasn't.
My mother, Jagoda Kaloper, had been one of the biggest movie stars in the former Yugoslavia. Today, she is also a renowned conceptual artist, painter and graphic designer.
And she is very much alive.
A few hours later, she received a text message from the journalist who had written the article, sending his sincere apologies.
