fiction(76)

The Hours and the Minutes

The Hours and The Minutes was first published in Bratislava in 1956, the year of Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’, in which the Soviet...

The Chattertooth Eleven

Eduard Bass' story from 1922, a classic of Czech literature, has been published in English (Karolinum 2008). The translation, distinctive...

The Last Thing

Slovak Jewish writer Leopold Lahola escaped deportation to a concentration camp and fought in the resistance, only to find himself forced...

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...

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 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...

Transfigured Night

Leonora Marty, who fled Czechoslovakia decades earlier, has returned after the Velvet Revolution. Having concluded her ballet of The Makr...

Un été capricieux

In Summer of Caprice (the classic novel of the Twenties that was adapted into the beloved film of the Czech New Wave in the Sixties) the ...

Un'estate capricciosa

Vladislav Vančura's Summer of Caprice is commonly considered untranslatable. The playful style of the narrative, the level of language ma...

Unsound Siblings

Bondy’s merry utopia, or rather anti-utopia, was written during the bleakest years of “normalization” in Communist Czechoslovakia during ...

Velitelem města Bugulmy

Jaroslav Hašek is a Czech writer most famous for his widely read if incomplete novel The Good Soldier Schweik, a series of absurdist vign...

Velvet Blues

Throughout history, the Romani people—as representatives of an oral culture—have been written about by outsiders, often idealised, defame...

Twentieth Century in the Stories of Czechoslovak Roma