Modern Czech Classics(45)

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

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...

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 ...

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...

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

A Czech Dreambook

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

Kde život náš je v půli se svou poutí

Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life is the first line of "Inferno" from Dante’s Divine Comedy, and right from the start, the name is in b...

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

Writing Underground

In this collection of writings produced between 2000 and 2018, the pioneering literary historian of the Czech underground, Martin Machove...

Reflections on Samizdat Literature in Totalitarian Czechoslovakia

Rusalka

Famous as the libretto for Antonín Dvořák’s opera of the same name, Jaroslav Kvapil’s poem Rusalka is an intriguing work of literature on...

A Lyrical Fairy Tale in Three Acts