Download or read book Of Mice and Mooshaber written by Ladislav Fuks and published by Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2014-06-01 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ladislav Fuks is an outstanding Czech writer, whose works primarily consist of psychological fiction focusing on the themes of anxiety and life in totalitarian systems. He is well known for his short fiction treating the theme of holocaust, specifically for his works The Cremator (Spalovač mrtvol), which was filmed in 1969, and Mr. Theodore Mundstock (Pan Theodor Mundstock). Natalia Mooshabr’s Mice (Myši Natálie Mooshabrové) is his first novel, in which he abandoned the theme of the holocaust moving on to the horror genre. The story takes place in an unspecified country whose ruler was overthrown and replaced by a dictator. The main protagonist, Mrs Mooshabr, is an old widow whose husband was a coachman in a brewery. Her life spins around her work (she is a caretaker for difficult children), her own ungrateful children and her fear of "mice", which she tries to catch in traps. Through the use of mystery and insinuations, Fuks brings the story to a surprising, tragic ending, revealing the evil through the souls of some of his characters. He employs the grotesque, fantastic surrealism to affect the reader, using negative and exaggerated elements to unveil reality. This work was written before the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, but it was not published until 1970.
Download or read book The Shop on Main Street written by Ladislav Grosman and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classical work of the 1960s Czechoslovak literature and film in a new publication of Iris Urwin Lewit’s translation. An original and relevant contribution to the question: "are all people brothers.” Illustrated by Jiří Grus, epilogue by Benjamin Frommer.
Download or read book Beyond the World of Men written by Božena Benešová and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2024-02-01 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection opens a window into the largely unknown world of Czech women’s writing in the fin de siècle. With stories of women compelled to marry, women driven to suicide, of seduction, solitude, and of the breakup of a lesbian affair, a broad spectrum of women’s lives in that era is represented. The works draw in city and country, high society and more humble backgrounds, as well as including a couple of translations from German, reminding us that Czech literature is the common inheritance of all the writers who lived and worked in Bohemia and Moravia. Linked together by the injustice of patriarchal society, the sheer variety of stories here is a testament to the richness and depth of these women’s struggles, thought and experience.
Download or read book Why I Write written by Bohumil Hrabal and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of the earliest prose by one of literature’s greatest stylists captures, as scholar Arnault Maréchal put it, “the moment when Hrabal discovered the magic of writing.” Taken from the period when Bohumil Hrabal shifted his focus from poetry to prose, these stories—many written in school notebooks, typed and read aloud to friends, or published in samizdat—often showcase raw experiments in style that would define his later works. Others intriguingly utilize forms the author would never pursue again. Featuring the first appearance of key figures from Hrabal’s later writings, such as his real-life Uncle Pepin, who would become a character in his later fiction and is credited here as a coauthor of one piece, the book also contains stories that Hrabal would go on to cannibalize for some of his most famous novels. All together, Why I Write? offers readers the chance to explore this liminal phase of Hrabal’s writing. Expertly interpreted by award-winning Hrabal translator David Short, this collection comprises some of the last remaining prose works by Hrabal to be translated into English. A treasure trove for Hrabal devotees, Why I Write? allows us to see clearly why this great prose master was, as described by Czech writer and publisher Josef Škvorecký, “fundamentally a lyrical poet.”
Download or read book Seven Days to the Funeral written by Ján Rozner and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2024-02-01 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seven Days to the Funeral is the fictionalised memoir of Ján Rozner, a leading Slovak journalist, critic, dramaturg, and translator. Rozner and his wife Zora Jesenská were champions of the Prague Spring and were blacklisted after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. When Jesenská died in 1972, her funeral became a political event and attendees faced recriminations. A painstaking account of the week after his wife’s death, Seven Days to the Funeral is a historical record of the devastating impact of the period after the invasion. Rozner wrote with brutal honesty not only about himself, his emotions and past experience but about key figures in Slovak culture, providing a fascinating cultural history of Slovakia from 1945 to 1972. It is also a moving love story of an unlikely couple. When this compelling work of autofiction was posthumously published in 2009 it catapulted the author, who had died in exile and been almost forgotten in Slovakia, to posthumous literary fame.
Download or read book From Shakespeare to Autofiction written by Martin Procházka and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2024-04-23 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Shakespeare to Autofiction focuses on salient features of authorship throughout modernity, ranging from transformations of oral tradition and the roles of empirical authors, through collaborative authorship and authorship as ‘cultural capital’, to the shifting roles of authors in recent autofiction and biofiction. In response to Roland Barthes’ ‘removal of the Author’ and its substitution by Michel Foucault’s ‘author function’, different historical forms of modern authorship are approached as ‘multiplicities’ integrated by agency, performativity and intensity in the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, Wolfgang Iser, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The book also reassesses recent debates of authorship in European and Latin American literatures. It demonstrates that the outcomes of these debates need wider theoretical and methodological reflection that takes into account the historical development of authorship and changing understandings of fiction, performativity and new media. Individual chapters trace significant moments in the history of authorship from the early modernity to the present (from Shakespeare’s First Folio to Latin American experimental autofiction), and discuss the methodologies reinstating the author and authorship as the irreducible aspects of literary process. Praise for From Shakespeare to Autofiction 'In this collection a multicultural group of literary scholars analyse a rich array of authorship types and models across four centuries. After decades of liquid poststructuralist concepts, it is refreshing and inspiring to think through such diversity of authorship strategies – from oral culture, through sociological constructs, to self-referential and autobiographical ontological games that writers play with us, their readers.' Pavel Drábek, University of Hull
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Communism Volume 3 Endgames Late Communism in Global Perspective 1968 to the Present written by Juliane Fürst and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-21 with total page 1080 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third volume of The Cambridge History of Communism spans the period from the 1960s to the present, documenting the last two decades of the global Cold War and the collapse of Soviet socialism. An international team of scholars analyze the rise of China as a global power continuing to proclaim its Maoist allegiance, and the transformation of the geopolitics and political economy of Cold War conflict in an era of increasing economic interpenetration. Beneath the surface, profound political, social, economic and cultural changes were occurring in the socialist and former socialist countries, resulting in the collapse and transformations of the existing socialist order and the changing parameters of world Marxism. This volume draws on innovative research to bring together history from above and below, including social, cultural, gender, and transnational history to transcend the old separation between Communist studies and the broader field of contemporary history.
Download or read book Saturnin written by Zdeněk Jirotka and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2016-10-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On its initial publication in Czech in 1942, Saturnin was a best-seller. This is entirely appropriate, for while Saturnin draws on a tradition of Czech comedy and authors such as J. Hašek, K. Čapek and K. Poláček, it was also clearly influenced by the English masters Jerome K. Jerome and P. G. Wodehouse. Saturnin is the story of a young man in love and his faithful servant Saturnin, who upsets the peaceful rhythm of his master’s domestic arrangements and turns his life inside out. He lures him into an exotic world where he is forced to live dangerously, and shows him how to cope with any situation. Saturnin lays bare the weaknesses of others and compels them to disclose their ‘true’ nature – he is a subversive servant. Written at a time when Czechoslovakia was deep in the grip of the Nazi occupation, Saturnin showed that one form of resistance was to put the world created by invasion out of your mind and create another. However, so recognisably Czech was that ‘other’ that its popularity did not diminish with the end of the war or, indeed, with the end of the forty years of communism that followed shortly after the war’s end. The book has been adapted for radio and television, produced as a film and has a regular place in the repertoire of the Czech stage. “A delicious dry humour and an imaginative flair that makes it much more than just the ‘Czech Jeeves.’ Owing more to Jerome K. Jerome than to P. G. Wodehouse, the writing is rich in homespun wisdom and casual asides that take on a life of their own, leading the reader up charming byways of irrelevance… A surprising number of belly-laughs for a novel that is more than half a century old.” —Adam Preston, Times Literary Supplement
Download or read book The Cremator written by Ladislav Fuks and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2016-10-01 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The devil’s neatest trick is to persuade us that he doesn’t exist.” It is a maxim that both rings true in our contemporary world and pervades this tragicomic novel of anxiety and evil set amid the horrors of World War II. As a gay man living in a totalitarian, patriarchal society, noted Czech writer Ladislav Fuks identified with the tragic fate of his Jewish countrymen during the Holocaust. The Cremator arises from that shared experience. Fuks presents a grotesque, dystopian world in which a dutiful father, following the strict logic of his time, liberates the souls of his loved ones by destroying their bodies—first the dead, then the living. As we watch this very human character—a character who never ceases to believe that he is doing good—become possessed by an inhuman ideology, the evil that initially permeates the novel’s atmosphere concretizes in this familiar family man. A study of the totalitarian mindset with stunning resonance for today, The Cremator is a disturbing, powerful work of literary horror.
Download or read book Behind the Lines written by Jaroslav Hašek and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2016-08-01 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collection of short stories entitled Behind the Lines: Bulguma and Other Stories draws on Hašek’s experience from revolutionary Russia. In a manner similar to that employed in his caricatures of the pre-war monarchy, he satirically captures events of the Bolshevik revolution from the perspective of a Red commissar in a combination of grotesque humor and sarcasm. Historical events serve merely as part of the historical mystification. Hašek presents them as he perceived them as a man and participant in historical events. He depicts them primarily as simple and human, pushing his critical view into the background. On the border of a comic exaggeration and a realistic depiction, an amusing story about a forgotten Tartar town of Bugulma unfolds featuring the Soviet commander of the Tver Revolutionary Regiment, drunk Yerokhimov, and Comrade Gašek, the Commanding Officer of Bugulma. Employing humor and exaggeration, Hašek demonstrates the zealotry of the revolutionary period as well as the stupidity and simple human insecurity of authoritarians. The collection of short stories, Behind the Lines, also includes other sketches by Hašek, written at the same time.
Download or read book Sign System and Function written by Jerzy Pelc and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-02-10 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No detailed description available for "Sign, System and Function".
Download or read book Bohumil Hrabal A Full length Portrait written by Jiří Pelán and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Described as “one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century,” Bohumil Hrabal ranks among the most important and widely translated Czech authors. Jiří Pelán, a respected scholar of Czech, French and Italian literature, approaches Hrabal as a comparatist, expertly situating him within the context of European and world literature, as he explores the entirety of Hrabal’s oeuvre and its development over sixty years. Praised for its concise, clear and readable style, Bohumil Hrabal: A Full-length Portrait offers international readers an important Czech perspective on the world-class author. Contains 32 photographs of Bohumil Hrabal, a list of his works’ English translations to date, and a bibliography of international scholarship.
Download or read book A World Apart and Other Stories written by Kathleen Hayes and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2022-12-01 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “It grew dark and a mist spread over the countryside like a curtain. We were at the Bohemian border. Customs control, shouting, the din of the station, and finally the train moved on with a monotonous drone. ‘It was right here that I met Teresa Elinson,’ Marta said, in the corner of the cozy compartment. I replied: ‘Who is Teresa Elinson? I don’t remember you ever mentioning her.’ ‘No, never. It was a kind of adventure. That time too the train hurtled into the dark, where red sparks flew and lights flashed, scattering in the mist...’” Thus begins the story by Růžena Jesenská that gives this book its name. In this anthology, Kathleen Hayes has selected and translated eight stories by Czech female authors at the turn of the 19th and 20th century: a period of female political emancipation and impressive literary development. All of the writers included in the present volume were recognized in their own day and constitute a cross-section of the literary styles of the period. Tilschová’s “A Sad Time” is written in a Naturalist style; Jesenská’s “A World Apart” presents themes and motifs that appealed to the Decadents. Malířová’s “The Sylph” is both diaristic and satirical, while Svobodová’s ironical “A Great Passion”, with its rural setting and folklore motifs, reminds one of the writings of Karel Jaromír Erben. Preissová’s short story may be read as a celebration of folk culture. Benešová’s “Friends” is interesting for its psychological presentation of a child’s point of view and its implicit criticism of anti-Semitism. The book is accompanied by the biographies of each author and an introduction by Kathleen Hayes.
Download or read book Ear written by Jan Procházka and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2022-09-01 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A paranoid thriller of life under surveillance in Communist Czechoslovakia. A deputy minister in the Communist Party, Ludvík enjoys all the luxuries that political success affords him, but he must be careful since he knows the secret police have bugged his apartment. Penned under the oppressive watch of Soviet authorities in 1960s Czechoslovakia—but touching on still-current themes of surveillance and paranoia—this darkly comic, cinematic thriller is as tense and timely as ever. Author Jan Procházka knew firsthand the gnawing terror of life in a surveillance state. A promising Party member who became persona non grata after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, his own apartment was discovered to contain no less than twelve hidden microphones.
Download or read book The Pied Piper written by Viktor Dyk and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2018-04-01 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Básník, prozaik, dramatik a publicista Viktor Dyk se v této novele (časopisecky 1911–1912, knižně 1915) inspiroval starou saskou pověstí, již použil jako volný rámec pro vyprávění o tajemném poutníkovi, který na žádost občanů očistí svou píšťalou hanzovní město Hammeln od krys, avšak rozčarován malodušností konšelů a zrazen v lásce, zneužije píšťaly a odvede za trest celé město do zkázy. Protipólem postavy krysaře, osudově formovaného hrdiny, osamělého a neklidného snivce ztělesňujícího svět buřičů, je v knize rybář Sepp Jörgen, jenž se s realitou smiřuje a záchranou kojence dá vyrůst nové naději. Dyk v této novele, jež odráží novoklasicistní směřování jeho pozdní tvorby, tak dokázal využít staré předlohy k vytvoření svrchovaného prozaického díla o konfliktu iluze a skutečnosti. Jeho tajuplná atmosféra předznamenává pozdější baladickou prózu 30. let.
Download or read book Handbook of Czech Prose Writings 1940 2005 written by Bohuslava Bradbrook and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2006-12-01 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The turbulent events of World War II and the subsequent communist regime in Czechoslovakia restricted Czech writers' freedom of expression. As Czech literature was developing in two different locations and conditions, writers on both sides created diverse works. This book aims to complete the picture of life during that period.
Download or read book The Lesser Histories written by Jan Zábrana and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2022-06-01 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the eighth floor of a tower block in Central Europe, Jan Zábrana surveyed the twentieth century. He had been exiled from his own life by Communism. His parents were imprisoned, their health broken, and he was not allowed to study languages in college. Refusing both to rebel outright or to cave in, he thought of himself as a dead man walking. “To all those who keep asking me to do things for them, I sometimes feel like saying: ‘But I’m dead. I died long ago. Why do you keep treating me as if I were one of the living?’” Yet during some of Europe’s most difficult years, he wrote The Lesser Histories, a collection of sixty-four sonnets that range through themes of age, sex, and political repression—a radiant testament to his times. The lines are emptied both of personal pathos and political stridency. Often Zábrana’s own voice segues into those of poets he had translated over the years, leaving only a bare shimmer of subjectivity—humorous, oblique, pained—with which to view his own works and days. The poems document a splendid and bitter isolation, and are immersed in the humor, hatreds, and loves of the everyday. Published in Czech in the ill-fated year of 1968, they subsequently fell into neglect. After the fall of Communism in 1989, Zábrana’s collected poems and selected diaries were published in Czech, and he was acclaimed as a major twentieth-century writer. Now, with this collection, he can begin to reach English-language readers for the first time.
