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...
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...
Prentis, the narrator of this nightmarish novel, catalogs "dead crimes" for a branch of the London Police Department and suspects that he is going crazy. His files keep vanishing. His boss subjects him to cryptic taunts. His family despises him. And...
In the eighth in the Strangers and Brothers series Donald Howard, a young science Fellow is charged with scientific fraud and dismissed from his college. This novel, which became a successful West End play, describes a miscarriage of justice in the...
Seventh in the Strangers and Brothers series, this is a novel of conflict exploring the world of the great Anglo-Jewish banking families between the two World Wars. Charles March is heir to one of these families and is beginning to make a name for...
The corridors and committee rooms of Whitehall are the setting for the ninth in the Strangers and Brothers series. They are also home to the manipulation of political power. Roger Quaife wages his ban-the-bomb campaign from his seat in the Cabinet...