Compassion, levity, and laughter can be found in the darkest of places—and even in the smallest of creatures. Set in 1943 Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, J. R. Pick’s novella Society for the
For The Pied Piper, Czech writer Viktor Dyk found his muse in the much retold medieval Saxon legend of the villainous, pipe-playing rat-catcher. Dyk uses the tale as a loose frame for his story of a m
It’s 1979 in Communist Czechoslovakia, ten years into the crushing period known as normalization, and Ludvík Vaculík has writer’s block. It has been nearly a decade since he
Jaroslav Hašek is a Czech writer most famous for his wickedly funny, widely read yet incomplete novelThe Good Soldier Schweik, a series of absurdist vignettes about a recalcitrant WWI soldier. Hašek—i
On its initial publication in Czech in 1942, Saturnin was a best-seller, its gentle satire offering an unexpected—if temporary—reprieve from the grim reality of the German occupation. In the years sin
Novelist Bohumil Hrabal was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and he spent decades working at a variety of laboring jobs before turning to writing in his late forties. From that point, he quickly made his
Described by Parul Sehgal in the New York Times Book Review as “one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century; the scourge of state censors; the gregarious bar hound and lover of goss
Springtide A chaffinch in a tree of cherry sings merrily spring’s introit. Its blazing bobble dwells in leaves, alive, and swells in scarlet. The flowers are flares of white. The chaffinch has g
From political novels to surrealist poetry and censored rock and roll, Czech underground culture of the later twentieth century displayed an astonishing, and unheralded, variety. This fascinating expl
This collection of the earliest prose by one of literature's greatest stylists captures, as scholar Arnault Mar chal put it, "the moment when Hrabal discovered the magic of writing." Taken from the pe
