Centered on an elderly retiree and his intellectual adversary, the shrewd Inspector Lebeda, "Case Closed" is filled with all the expected elements of a thriller--murder, rape, suicide --but soon reveals itself as a wily and sophisticated parable about the dangers of language itself, in which the author takes aim at human nature with a devastating arsenal of genre-mixing, wordplay, and whimsical, biting satire.
Centered on an elderly retiree and his intellectual adversary, the shrewd Inspector Lebeda, "Case Closed" is filled with all the expected elements ...
The nineteenth-century founding of "free settlements" in the Americas serves as a starting point for the new novel by popular Czech author Patrik Ouredn?k. Simultaneously satiric and philosophical, "The Opportune Moment, 1855," opens with an Italian anarchist's missive to his noble former mistress, an impassioned rejection of all of Europe's latest and greatest advancements, from the Enlightenment to social reform to communist revolution. We then leap back in time half a century to the alternately somber and hilarious shipboard diary of a common Italian everyman sailing to Brazil with a...
The nineteenth-century founding of "free settlements" in the Americas serves as a starting point for the new novel by popular Czech author Patrik O...
Written between 1954 and 1957 and treating events from the Stalinist era of Czechoslovakia's postwar Communist regime, Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life flew in the face of the reigning aesthetic of socialist realism, an anti-heroic novel informed by the literary theory of Viktor Shklovsky and constructed from episodes and lyrical sketches of the author and his neighbors' everyday life in industrial north Bohemia, set against a backdrop of historical and cultural upheaval. Meditative and speculative reflections here alternate and overlap with fragmentary accounts of...
Written between 1954 and 1957 and treating events from the Stalinist era of Czechoslovakia's postwar Communist regime, Midway Upon the Journey ...
"The Attempt is historical fiction at its best. Through its narrator's archival approach to his material, the book explores the intimate lives of a pair of fervent idealists, as well as a robber baron and his family. The result is a vivid, poignant narrative about political upheaval, both in the past and the present." --SIRI HUSTVEDT, author of The Blazing World When a Czech historian becomes convinced he's the illegitimate great-grandson of an infamous anarchist who attempted an assassination while living in the United States, he travels to New York to investigate....
"The Attempt is historical fiction at its best. Through its narrator's archival approach to his material, the book explores the intimate lives ...
Jachym Topol is the most-translated Czech author of his generation, lauded for his imaginative storytelling and his inventive use of language. Melding fiction and documentary, with a dash of black humor on the side, he zeroes in on the agonies and injustices of the totalitarian past, in his own country and throughout Central and Eastern Europe.
Angel Station takes its title from the bustling Metro stop in the Prague district of Smichov. Until the gentrification of the late 1990s, it was a rough-and-tumble, working-class neighborhood with a sizeable Roma and Vietnamese...
Jachym Topol is the most-translated Czech author of his generation, lauded for his imaginative storytelling and his inventive use of language. Meld...
A HumorousInsofar as That Is PossibleNovella from the Ghetto. Set in 1943 Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, novella tells the story of Tony, a thirteen-year-old boy who is deported from Prague to the infamous Terezn.
A HumorousInsofar as That Is PossibleNovella from the Ghetto. Set in 1943 Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, novella tells the story of Tony, a thirteen-ye...
A foul-mouthed Prague prostitute muses on her profession, aging and the nature of materialism as imagined in her own reality TV series. In an unvarnished mixture of vulgar and poetic language, the episodes combine the mundane with fetishism, violence and dark humour.
A foul-mouthed Prague prostitute muses on her profession, aging and the nature of materialism as imagined in her own reality TV series. In an unvarnis...
