A visionary work of science fiction that introduced the word "robot"

Written in 1920, premiered in Prague in 1921, and first performed in New York in 1922--garnered worldwide acclaim for its author and popularized the word robot. Mass-produced as efficient laborers to serve man, Capek's Robots are an android product--they remember everything but think of nothing new. But the Utopian life they provide ultimately lacks meaning, and the humans they serve stop reproducing. When the Robots revolt, killing all but one of their masters, they must strain to learn the secret of...

From an internationally acclaimed Czech writer comes a shrewd, humane, and poignant novel, set in Prague before the Velvet Revolution, whose perceptions about love, conscience, and betrayal cut to the bone of life in both totalitarian and democratic societies. A chilling story from the underground.--The New York Times.

Part thriller, part domestic tragedy, at once political and intensely personal, Ivan Kilma's epicly scaled new novel is an inquest into the compromises that turned even the best citizens of Czechoslovakia into accomplices of its late totalitarian regime. "Enormously powerful."--New York Times Book Review.

When a beautiful married woman walks into Pastor Daniel Vedra's life and conjures up memories of his first wife, Jitka, he struggles with the chaos the affair creates for his wife, his children, his vocation, and his future.

Ivan Klima has been acclaimed by The Boston Globe as "a literary gem who is too little appreciated in the West" and a "Czech master at the top of his game." In No Saints or Angels, a Washington Post Best Book of 2001, Klima takes us into the heart of contemporary Prague, where the Communist People's Militia of the Stalinist era marches headlong into the drug culture of the present. Kristyna is in her forties, the divorced mother of a rebellious fifteen-year-old daughter, Jana. She is beginning to love a man fifteen years her junior, but her joy is clouded by worry -- Jana has been cutting...

A New York Times Notable Book and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light is the story of Pavel, once a promising, award-winning documentary filmmaker, forced to survive under communism by working as a cameraman for the state-run television station. Now middle-aged, he dreams of one day making a film a searing portrait of his times that the authorities would never allow. When the communist regime collapses, Pavel is unprepared for the new world of supposedly unlimited freedom, unable to make the film he has always wanted to make. Waiting for the...

Collection of Jan Neruda's intimate, wry, bitter-sweet stories of life among the inhabitants of Mala Strana, the Little Quarter of nineteenth century Prague. These finely tuned and varied vignettes established Neruda as the quintessential Czech nineteenth century realist, the Charles Dickens of a Prague becoming ever more aware of itself as a Czech, rather than an Austrian city. Prague Tales is a classic story whose influence has been acknowledged by generations of Czech writers, including Ivan Klima, who has contributed an introduction to this new translation.

Seven stories offer a satiric look at life in modern Czechoslovakia, including the black market, love, thievery, religion, and the need for secrecy.