Originally published in Poland in 1948, and acclaimed as one of the finest postwar Polish novels, Ashes and Diamonds takes place in the spring of 1945, as the nation is in the throes of its transforma
Summoned to Geneva to participate in an oral history project about the collapse of Eastern European communism, a Warsaw sociologist resolves to tell his story through a gallery of portraits of the man
This is the first English-language collection of stories by the nineteenth-century writer Boleslaw Prus, who has been called the greatest Polish novelist of all time. While some of his major novels ha
This novel, set in the 1970s, tells the story of the "author" - a middle-aged Polish professor who lives abroad but who earlier survived the Nazi concentration camps - and Rudolf, an old man. In the 1
Originally written in 1936, two years before Capek's death and three years before the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, War with the Newts is considered by many to be Capek's greatest book.Working in
Like traditional fairy tales, Capek's fantastic parables contain marvels and supernatural beings, fairies, elves, and talking animals; their plots stem from folk traditions where innocence triumphs.
Michal Viewegh's novel Bringing Up Girls in Bohemia is the story of the young Beata Kralova and her not-so-young tutor.Beata is a 20-year-old drop-out and daughter of Denis Kral (i.e., King), a Czech
The Unloved traces five months in the life of Perla S., a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl who, while living in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, becomes a prostitute. Capturing Perla's voice th
David Albahari is one of the most prominent prose writers to come out of the former Yugoslavia in the last twenty years. His short stories, which developed largely outside the canon of Serbian literat
Death and the Dervish is a first-person narrative told from the point of view of Sheikh Nuruddin, a dervish at a Sarajevo monastery in the eighteenth century during the Turkish occupation. The spirit
A vibrant Jewish community flourished in Poland from late in the tenth century until it was virtually annihilated in World War II. In this remarkable anthology, the first of its kind, Harold B. Segel
In a sequence of poems inspired by the Nobel laureate's homeland, this collection explores the nature of imagination, good and bad human experiences, and the celebration of the wonders and joys of lif
During his long and distinguished career, the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleza (1893-1981) battled against many forms of tyranny. In On the Edge of Reason his protagonist is a middle-aged lawyer whose
This collection first appeared as a special issue of Storm, the British literary journal of new eastern European writing. Joanna Labon has selected excellent, timely essays, stories, drama, and prose
This volume is a landmark of Holocaust Literature and among the finest works of fiction produced by any writer since World War II. The center of Arnost Lustig's impressive oeuvre, the collection expre
Martin and Tomas leave Prague on Christmas Day for "that other country." Although their destination is the mountains, their departure has been initiated by a search for their own identity--people in t
