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Tags: czech

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  The Unbearable Lightness of Being

  by Milan Kundera

  A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover — these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel... (more)
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  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  by Milan Kundera

  Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined,... (more)
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  The Trial

  by Franz Kafka

  Written in 1914, The Trial is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. The terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism,... (more)
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  The Joke

  by Milan Kundera

  All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring... (more)
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  Ignorance

  by Milan Kundera

  Irena and Josef meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence "their memories no longer match."
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  Immortality

  by Milan Kundera

  Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery... (more)
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  Laughable Loves

  by Milan Kundera

  Milan Kundera is a master of graceful illusion and illuminating surprise. In one of these stories a young man and his girlfriend pretend that she is a stranger he picked up on the road--only to become strangers to each other in reality as their game proceeds. In another a teacher fakes piety in order to seduce a devout girl, then jilts her and yearns for God. In yet another girls wait in bars, on beaches, and on... (more)
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  The Metamorphosis

  by Franz Kafka

  The Metamorphosis is a short story written by author Franz Kafka. Originally published in 1915, The Metamorphosis is considered to be the most famous of Kafka's works. It is the story of a traveling salesman, named Gregor Samsa, who transforms into a monstrous vermin while trying to find himself. The Metamorphosis is highly recommended for those who enjoy the writings of Franz Kafka, and for those who are... (more)
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  Slowness

  by Milan Kundera

  Two tales of seduction, separated by more than two hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic in this, Milan Kundera's lightest novel. In the 18th century, the marvelous Madame de T. summons a young nobleman to her chamber and gives him an unforgettable lesson in the art of seduction and the pleasures of love. In the same chat at the end of the 20th century, a hapless intellectual... (more)
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  The Good Soldier Švejk

  And His Fortunes in the World War

  by Jaroslav Hašek

  In "The Good Soldier Švejk," celebrated Czech writer and anarchist Jaroslav Hašek combined dazzling wordplay and piercing satire in a hilariously subversive depiction of the futility of war. Good-natured and garrulous, Švejk becomes the Austrian army’s most loyal Czech soldier when he is called up on the outbreak of World War I — although his bumbling attempts to get to the front serve only to prevent him from... (more)
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  Life Is Elsewhere

  by Milan Kundera

  The author intially intended to call this novel "The Lyrical Age". The lyrical age, according to Kundera, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderlyerodes scarosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made hima poet and accompanies him (figuratively) to his love bed and (literally) to his deathbed. A... (more)
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  The Castle

  by Franz Kafka

  Based on the restored text of Kafka's masterpiece, Mark Harman's acclaimed translation is "the closest to Kafka's original novel and intention that any translation could get . . . eminently readable" (Egon Schwartz, Washington University in St. Louis).
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  The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

  by Franz Kafka

  Since his death in 1924, Kafka has come to be regarded as one of the greatest modern writers, one whose work brilliantly explores the anxiety, futility, and complexity of modern life. The precision and clarity of Kafka's style, its powerful symbolism, and his existential exploration of the human condition have given his work universal significance.In addition to the title selection, considered by many... (more)
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  Too Loud a Solitude

  by Bohumil Hrabal

  Hantá rescues books from the jaws of his compacting press and carries them home. Hrabal, whom Milan Kundera calls “our very best writer today,” celebrates the power and the indestructibility of the written word.Originally published in Czech as "Příliš hlučná samota."
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  Amerika

  or, The Man Who Disappeared

  by Franz Kafka

  Text: English (translation) Original Language: German
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  The Farewell Waltz

  by Milan Kundera

  In this dark farce of a novel, set in an old-fashioned Central Euroepean spa town, eight characters are swept up in an accelerating dance: a pretty nurse and her repairman boyfriend; an oddball gynecologist; a rich Amrican (at once saint and Don Juan); a popular trumpeter and his beautiful, obsessively jealous wife; an unillusioned former political prisoner about to leave his country and his young woman ward.... (more)
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  Identity

  by Milan Kundera

  There are situations in which we fail for a moment to recognize the person we are with, in which the identity of the other is erased while we simultaneously doubt our own. This also happens with couples--indeed, above all with couples, because lovers fear more than anything else "losing sight" of the loved one. With stunning artfulness in expanding and playing variations on the meaningful moment, Milan Kundera has... (more)
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  War with the Newts

  by Karel Čapek

  One of the great anti-utopian satires of the twentieth century, an inspiration to writers from Orwell to Vonnegut, at last in a modern translation. Man discovers a species of giant, intelligent newts and learns to exploit them so successfully that the newts gain skills and arms enough to challenge man's place at the top of the animal kingdom. Along the way, Karel Capek satirizes science, runaway capitalism,... (more)
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  The Golem

  by Gustav Meyrink

  Most famous supernatural novel in modern European literature, set in Ghetto of Old Prague around 1890. A compelling story of mystical experiences, strange transformations, profound terror. 13 black-and-white illustrations.
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  The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka

  by Franz Kafka

  How many writers get their own adjective? The work of this terminally alienated master narrator of the subconscious demanded a new descriptor; I guess they gave up and just settled on "Kafkaesque." But if you ever wonder what the original Kafkaesque work was, take a look here. The book contains all of Kafka's short and longer stories -- everything but his three novels. Most of these stories weren't even published... (more)