As he works, he meditates on Czechoslovakia, on Kafka, on life, on art and, obsessively, on his passionate and adulterous love affair with the sculptress Daria. Gradually he admits the impossibility of being at once an honest writer and an honest lover, and with that agonizing discovery comes a moment of choice.

    With the exception of his three novels, the whole of Kafka’s narrative work is included in this volume. --penguinrandomhouse.comTwo Introductory parables: Before the law --Imperial message --Longer stories: Description of a struggle --Wedding preparations in the country --Judgment --Metamorphosis --In the penal colony --Village schoolmaster (The giant mole) --Blumfeld, and elderly bachelor --Warden of the tomb --Country doctor --Hunter Gracchus --Hunter Gracchus: A fragment --Great Wall of China --News of the building of the wall: A fragment --Report to an academy --Report to an academy: Two fragments --Refusal --Hunger artist --Investigations of a dog --Little woman --The burrow --Josephine the singer, or the mouse folk --Children on a country road --The trees --Clothes --Excursion into the mountains --Rejection --The street window --The tradesman --Absent-minded window-gazing --The way home --Passers-by --On the tram --Reflections for gentlemen-jockeys --The wish to be a red Indian --Unhappiness --Bachelor's ill luck --Unmasking a confidence trickster --The sudden walk --Resolutions --A dream --Up in the gallery --A fratricide --The next village --A visit to a mine --Jackals and Arabs --The bridge --The bucket rider --The new advocate --An old manuscript --The knock at the manor gate --Eleven sons --My neighbor --A crossbreed (A sport) --The cares of a family man --A common confusion --The truth about Sancho Panza --The silence of the sirens --Prometheus --The city coat of arms --Poseidon --Fellowship --At night --The problem of our laws --The conscripton of troops --The test --The vulture --The helmsman --The top --A little fable --Home-coming --First sorrow --The departure --Advocates --The married couple --Give it up! --On parables.

    Beata is a 20-year-old drop-out and daughter of Denis Kral (i.e., King), a Czech "new millionaire" of dubious connections. Beata embraces lover after lover as well as causes new to Eastern Europe: the environment, animal rights, feminism, consumerism, new-age religion.This satirical look at Prague today by the best of the new Czech writers entertains with a parade of unnforgettable characters, the new mafiosi and their ex-secret police bodyguards, the expatriate Americans, and many an extraordinary Czech, from a cremation enthusiast to a hopelessly na�ve sex-education teacher.The novel is also a serious exploration of the role of the writer in post-communist Central Europe. The narrator, himself a writer and teacher who is in love with Beata, must portray her fate in terms that explain her nihilism without losing faith in his own positive craft of story- telling. His hard-won credo as artist is to be an entertainer in a world of newly felt cruelty and suffering.

    The essay dissects the nature of the communist regime of the time, life within such a regime and how by their very nature such regimes can create dissidents of ordinary citizens. The essay goes on to discuss ideas and possible actions by loose communities of individuals linked by a common cause, such as Charter 77. Officially suppressed, the essay was circulated in samizdat form and translated into multiple languages. It became a manifesto for dissent in Czechoslovakia, Poland and other communist regimes.

    Romance pro křídlovku představuje lyrickoepický vrchol Hrubínovy básnické tvorby.

    The red-headed prostitute Rosina; the junk-dealer Aaron Wassertrum; puppeteers; street musicians; and a deaf-mute silhouette artist.Lurking in its inhabitants’ subconscious is the Golem, a creature of rabbinical myth. Supposedly a manifestation of all the suffering of the ghetto, it comes to life every 33 years in a room without a door. When the jeweller Athanasius Pernath, suffering from broken dreams and amnesia, sees the Golem, he realises to his terror that the ghostly man of clay shares his own face...The Golem, though rarely seen, is central to the novel as a representative of the ghetto's own spirit and consciousness, brought to life by the suffering and misery that its inhabitants have endured over the centuries. Perhaps the most memorable figure in the story is the city of Prague itself, recognisable through its landmarks such as the Street of the Alchemists and the Castle.

    May, his epic masterpiece, was published in April 1836, just seven months before his death. Considered the "pearl" of Czech poetry, it is a tale of seduction, revenge, and patricide. A paean as well to nature, the beauty of its music and its innovative use of language, expertly captured in this new translation by Marcela Sulak, has ensured the poem's lasting popularity. Scorned at first by the national revivalists of the 19th century for being "un-Czech," Mácha was held up as a "national" poet by later generations, a fate which the interwar Czech avant-garde, who considered him a precursor, took it upon themselves to reverse.Unlike the other seminal 19th-century European poets, Mácha's work has been largely ignored in English translation. The present volume, the only available in English, provides the original Czech text in parallel and includes a series of illustrations by Jindřich Štyrský specifically created for the poem.

    Tachezy père, a philologist, is aghast; Lizinka's mother, on the other hand, sees this as a chance for real advancement. Lizinka herself? Well, she's blissfully immune from start to finish, in addition to being the innocent erotic focus for the hangmen's Institute's two co-directors, Simsa and Wolf: both of them have a go at her nubile body and blank countenance. . . and both sort of succeed. This is a marvelously edgy scenario--and Czech novelist-playwright Kohout's suavest textures are reserved for contrasting the satire (the State's inhumane notions of education) with the fizzy, doors-bursting-open vitalities of sex comedy. Furthermore, Simsa's and Wolf's backgrounds as secret-police cadre and Nazi collaborator respectively make them into especially delicious tables-turned victims of their ingenuous student. And there are set pieces aplenty, like the class play (in verse) at graduation for the fledgling executioners: ""Before the engine run by steam/ Appeared the first beheading machine. Yet decapitation, as we shall see,/ Remained an art: voilà , scene three!"" Admittedly, there's also a good deal of belaboring: Kohout trots out every fact and source from his research on the history of torture and capital punishment--under the guise of the Institute's academic program. Yet the novel rarely subsides into the milkiness which allegory is prone to; instead it seems to become ever more specific. Flighty perhaps, but also close and relentless, this is the comedy of truly fierce farce --less intellectually ironic and beguiling but ultimately more powerful than the work of Kohout's much-praised compatriot, Milan Kundera

    The novel's vision of Soviet life in the 1930s is so ferociously accurate that it could not be published during its author's lifetime and appeared only in a censored edition in the 1960s. Its truths are so enduring that its language has become part of the common Russian speech.One hot spring, the devil arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a retinue that includes a beautiful naked witch and an immense talking black cat with a fondness for chess and vodka. The visitors quickly wreak havoc in a city that refuses to believe in either God or Satan. But they also bring peace to two unhappy Muscovites: one is the Master, a writer pilloried for daring to write a novel about Christ and Pontius Pilate; the other is Margarita, who loves the Master so deeply that she is willing literally to go to hell for him. What ensues is a novel of inexhaustible energy, humor, and philosophical depth, a work whose nuances emerge for the first time in Diana Burgin's and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor's splendid English version.

    For he's the inventor of 'ice-nine', a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker's three ecentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to madness. Felix Hoenikker's Death Wish comes true when his last, fatal gift to humankind brings about the end, that for all of us, is nigh...

    More than a tale of possession, the novel probes disturbing depths of guilt, paranoia, and sexual obsession with an unsparing detachment.

    It is the story of Chauncey Gardiner - Chance, an enigmatic but distinguished man who emerges from nowhere to become an heir to the throne of a Wall Street tycoon, a presidential policy adviser, and a media icon. Truly "a man without qualities," Chance's straightforward responses to popular concerns are heralded as visionary. But though everyone is quoting him, no one is sure what he's really saying. And filling in the blanks in his background proves impossible. Being There is a brilliantly satiric look at the unreality of American media culture that is, if anything, more trenchant now than ever.

    The Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai's magisterial novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumours. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find - music, cosmology, fascism. The novel's characters are unforgettable: the evil Mrs. Eszter, plotting her takeover of the town; her weakling husband; and Valuska, our hapless hero with his head in the clouds, who is the tender center of the book, the only pure and noble soul to be found. Compact, powerful and intense, The Melancholy of Resistance, as its enormously gifted translator George Szirtes puts it, "is a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type." And yet, miraculously, the novel, in the words of The Guardian, "lifts the reader along in lunar leaps and bounds."

    Replete with potent symbolism and terrifying surrealistic imagery, Sadegh Hedayat's masterpice details a young man's despair after losing a mysterious lover. And as the author gradually drifts into frenzy and madness, the reader becomes caught in the sandstorm of Hedayat's bleak vision of the human condition. The Blind Owl, which has been translated into many foreign languages, has often been compared to the writing of Edgar Allan Poe.

    In the middle, meanwhile, are The Great Switcheroo and The Last Act, two stories exploring a darker side of desire and pleasure.In the black comedies of Switch Bitch Roald Dahl brilliantly captures the ins and outs, highs and lows of sex.'Dahl is too good a storyteller to become predictable' Daily TelegraphRoald Dahl, the brilliant and worldwide acclaimed author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, and many more classics for children, also wrote scores of short stories for adults. These delightfully disturbing tales have often been filmed and were most recently the inspiration for the West End play, Roald Dahl's Twisted Tales by Jeremy Dyson. Roald Dahl's stories continue to make readers shiver today.