Modern Czech Classics(35)

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 Dvorák’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

Lamentation for 77,297 Victims

Jiří Weil’s documentary prose poem, Lamentation for 77,297 Victims is a literary monument to the Czech Jews killed during the Holocaust. ...

Ploughshares into Swords

“The terrible bow was drawn taut. Men had let their powers be taken captive and had become the stooges of governments, they had become dr...

The Lesser Histories

From the eighth floor of a tower block in Central Europe, Jan Zábrana surveyed the twentieth century. He had been exiled from his own lif...

Ear

A paranoid thriller of life under surveillance in Communist Czechoslovakia. A deputy minister in the Communist Party, Ludvík enjoys all t...

Tales of the Prague Ghetto

Trained in philosophy and medicine, the writer, translator, scholar, and political and cultural activist Siegfried Kapper (1821–1879) dev...

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