Modern Czech Classics(45)

Why I Write?

This collection of the earliest prose by one of literature’s greatest stylists captures, as scholar Arnault Maréchal put it, “the moment ...

And Other Early Prose Pieces

A Czech Dreambook

It’s 1979 in Czechoslovakia, ten years into the crushing restoration of repressive communism known as normalization, and Ludvík Vaculík h...

Bohumil Hrabal

Described as “one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century,” Bohumil Hrabal ranks among the most important and widely transla...

A Full-length Portrait

The Shop on Main Street

A classical work of the 1960s Czechoslovak literature and film in a new publication of Iris Urwin Lewit’s translation. An original and re...

Spolek pro ochranu zvířat

In the terrifying reality of the Terezín fortress, children were living and coming of age in the shadow of death, which was often only a ...

Views from the Inside

From political novels to surrealist poetry and censored rock and roll, Czech underground culture of the latter twentieth century displaye...

Czech Underground Literature and Culture (1948–1989)

Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals

This book is subtitled "A Humorous – If Possible – Novella from the Ghetto." It was published in 1969 by a famous satirist from Prague, a...

A Humorous – Insofar as That Is Possible – Novella from the Ghetto

The Pied Piper

For The Pied Piper, Czech writer Viktor Dyk found his muse in the much retold medieval Saxon legend of the villainous, pipe-playing rat-c...

The Cremator (paperback)

“The devil’s neatest trick is to persuade us that he doesn’t exist.” It is a maxim that both rings true in our contemporary world and per...

The Well at Morning

Poet and artist Bohuslav Reynek spent most of his life in the relative obskurity of the Czech-Moravian Highlands; although he suffered at...

Selected Poems and Graphic Artworks, 1925–1971

Le Chasseur de rats (paperback)

This novella, written by poet, fiction writer, playwright and journalist Viktor Dyk, was first published as serial in a magazine in 1911–...

We Were a Handful (paperback)

The acclaimed novel We Were a Handful is the humorous story of five small-town boys. In 1943 during one of the lowest points of his life ...