A brutally funny, carnivalesque novel about love, death, and survival, from the Czech Republic's greatest living author &nbsp; Tab, an itinerant Czech actor, travels around Europe on the theater circuit with his partner, So&#328;a, and their two young sons, attending festivals and performing plays. Confronted with growing resentment toward foreigners, Tab decides to return home to the banks of the Sázava River, southeast of Prague. As soon as they arrive, Tab finds himself falsely accused of a terrible crime and forced to go on the run with his sons. Over the course of their journey, dodging authorities by car, foot, and raft, they encounter a motley cast of allies and enemies. The effects of Tab's sudden reappearance and just-as-sudden disappearance ripple through the community, catalyzing a chaotic chain of events that reaches a final, raucous crescendo. &nbsp; Hailed as "a picaresque romp of black humor and fantasy" (Times Literary Supplement), this is an unforgettable novel about discovering sparks of humanity even in the bleakest of places, in which love or the longing to find it lies around every bend.

A Sensitive Person: A Novel (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Literature & Fiction

Topol, Jáchym

Literary

Yale University Press

Winner of the Egon Hostovský Prize as Czech book of the year when it was originally published in 1994, this epic novel powerfully captures the sense of dislocation that followed the Czechs' newfound freedom in 1989. More than just the story of its young protagonist--who is part businessman, part gang member, part drifter--it is a novel that includes terrifying dream scenes, Czech and Native American legends, a nightmarish East European flea market, comic scenes about the literary world, and an oddly tender story of the love between the protagonist and his spiritual sister.

City, Sister, Silver

Catbird Press

Winner of the Egon Hostovský Prize as the best Czech book of the year, this epic novel powerfully captures the sense of dislocation that followed the Czechs’ newfound freedom in 1989. More than just the story of its young protagonist—who is part businessman, part gang member, part drifter—it is a novel that includes terrifying dream scenes, Czech and American Indian legends, a nightmarish Eastern European flea market, comic scenes about the literary world, and an oddly tender story of the love between the protagonist and his spiritual sister.

City Sister Silver (paperback)

Czechoslovakia, 1968. The Soviet troops have just invaded the country and, for the young orphan Ilya, life is suddenly turned on its head. At first there is relief that the mean-spirited nuns who run the orphanage have been driven out by the Communists, but as the children are left to fend for themselves, order and routine quickly give way to brutality and chaos, and Ilya finds himself drawn into the violence, both committing murder in order to save his best friend and forced to witness the death of his disabled brother. When the troops return, the orphans are given military training and, with his first-hand knowledge of the local terrain, Ilya becomes a guide to a Soviet tank commander, leading him ever deeper into a macabre world of random cruelty, moral compromise, and lasting shame.

Gargling with Tar

Portobello Books

Czechoslovakia, 1968. The Soviet troops have just invaded and, for the young orphan Ilya, life is suddenly turned on its head. At first there is relief that the mean-spirited nuns who run his orphanage have been driven out by the Red Army, but as the children are left to fend for themselves, order and routine quickly give way to brutality and chaos, and Ilya finds himself drawn into the violence. When the troops return, the orphans are given military training and, with his first-hand knowledge of the local terrain, Ilya becomes guide to a Soviet tank battalion, leading him ever deeper into a macabre world of random cruelty, moral compromise and lasting shame.

Gargling With Tar

Contemporary

Granta Books

One night in 1968, on the eve of the Soviet invasion, 13 year-old Ondra and his younger brother Kamil are bundled into a coach bound for their father's birthplace, a mountainous, forested village in northern Bohemia. But when they arrive it becomes clear that this escape promises its own perils, and the boys find themselves stranded in a rural community riven with petty suspicion and stained by prejudice, a borderland over which fleeing peoples, victims of genocide, and trigger-happy armies regularly tramp. Growing up in this dark, chaotic landscape, the two boys struggle to make a home for themselves, until a series of unexplained deaths push them to make bold decisions to ensure their survival.

Nightwork

The devil had his workshop here in Belarus. The deepest graves are in Belarus. But nobody knows about them' A young boy grows up in Terezín - an infamous fortress town with a sinister past. Together with his friends he plays happily in this former Nazi prison, scouting the tunnels for fragments of history under the careful eye of one of its survivors, Uncle Lebo, until one day there is an accident, and he is forced to leave. Returning to Terezín many years later, he joins Lebo's campaign to preserve the town, but before long the authorities impose a brutal crack-down, chaos ensues, and the narrator finds himself fleeing to Belarus, where fresh horrors drive him ever closer to the evils he had hoped to escape. Bold, brilliant and blackly comic, The Devil's Workshop paints a deeply troubling portrait of two countries dealing with their ghosts and asks: at what point do we consign the past to history?

The Devil's Workshop

Jachym Topol is the most-translated Czech author of his generation, lauded for his imaginative storytelling and his inventive use of language. Melding fiction and documentary, with a dash of black humor on the side, he zeroes in on the agonies and injustices of the totalitarian past, in his own country and throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Angel Station takes its title from the bustling Metro stop in the Prague district of Smíchov. Until the gentrification of the late 1990s, it was a rough-and-tumble, working-class neighborhood with a sizeable Roma and Vietnamese population. Topol’s novel, in sparse yet poetic language―agilely brought into English by the author’s longtime translator Alex Zucker―weaves together the brutal and disturbing fates of an addict, a shopkeeper, and a religious fanatic as they each follow the path they hope will lead them to serenity: drugs, money, and faith.

Angel Station (Czech Literature)

Dalkey Archive Press

Andel (Edice Granada) (Czech Edition)

Labyrint

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