This entire novel consists of a discussion between two friends — one who just returned from Europe, the other a young accountant — about a grand birthday party neither one was able to attend. This doesn't stop them from swapping stories and...
Juan José Saer’s Scars explores a crime committed by a laborer who shot his wife in the face; or, rather, it explores the circumstances of four characters who have some connection to the crime. Each of the stories in Scars explores a fragment in...
Novelist Bohumil Hrabal (1914-97) was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and spent decades working at a variety of laboring jobs before turning to writing in his late forties. From that point, he quickly made his mark on the Czech literary scene; by the...
Schultz, Sigmund Franz, Impresario, producer of flops in London's West End.
A walking or sometimes chauffeur-driven and often boot-propelled disaster area. Which disasters are often indulgently plotted by his aristocratic partners His Amazing...
Thanks to Paks’s courage and sacrifice, the long-vanished heir to the half-elven kingdom of Lyonya has been revealed as Kieri Phelan, a formidable mercenary captain who earned a title and enemies in the neighboring kingdom of Tsaia. Now, as Kieri...
Hauled back early from an exercise with the SAS, Agent Paul Richter is tasked with a short-notice extraction job.
It goes unexpectedly well, and as a kind of reward he’s given an easy one: he’s to investigate the case of James Holden, a...
Ivan Klima was in the United States when Russian tanks entered Prague in 1968 but, against the advice of friends, he returned home. He became a dissident, writing books (never published) that were invariably inspired by Czechoslovakia's repressive...
Ranging over nearly three decades, the stories collected in Ivan Klíma's Lovers for a Day offer a fine cross section of the Czech writer's career. Yet the book also traces the misunderstandings and frustrations, the hopes and disenchantments of an...
One of the last artistic expressions of life under communism, this novel captures the atmosphere in Prague between 1983 and 1987, where a dance could be broken up by the secret police, a traffic offense could lead to surveillance, and where...
It’s Christmastime and Detective Carella gets assigned three murders — including a bestselling author of ghost stories — and is soon after ghosts, mediums, and a crazed...