Prague Tales is a classic story whose influence has been acknowledged by generations of Czech writers.

    Over sixty years later, English-speaking readers can become acquainted with Jirotka's novel, whose main hero is the legendary faithful servant Saturnin, fighting with aunt Katerina and her son Milouš. The book is accompanied by original colour illustrations by the Czech painter Adolf Born.

    The central character of this story, set in Eastern Bohemia, is a grandmother, full of simple wisdom, goodness and love, who personifies an ideal of maternal care. The Prošek family live in this country idyll but their father’s work means that he is compelled to spend a large part of the year in the imperial city of Vienna. Thus, their grandmother is brought home to look after the children and the property. This is the background against which the author unfolds the most important prose work in Czech literature and creates “one of the best female characters in world literature”.

    The seven stories are all concerned with love, or rather with the complex erotic games and stratagems employed by women and especially men as they try to come to terms with needs and impulses that can start a terrifying train of events. Sexual attraction is shown as a game that often turns sour, an experience that brings with it painful insights and releases uncertainty, panic, vanity and a constant need for reassurance. Thus a young couple on holiday start a game of pretence that threatens to destroy their relationship, two middle-aged men go in search of girls they don't really want, a young man renews contact with an older woman who feels humiliated by her ageing body, an elderly doctor uses his beautiful wife to increase his attraction and minister to his sexual vanity. In Laughable Loves, Milan Kundera shows himself, once again, as a master of fiction's most graceful illusions and surprises.

    One need not accept his view of the world to experience it and enjoy it in all of its ambiguity, just as one does the stage.— Václav HavelPhilosopher, novelist, essayist, eccentric, no other Czech author has had a greater impact on underground culture than Ladislav Klíma (1878-1928). Mentor to artists as varied as Bohumil Hrabal and the Plastic People of the Universe, Klíma’s philosophy was radically subjectivist, and he felt it should be lived rather than merely spoken or written about. With Nietzsche as his paragon, he embarked upon a lifelong pursuit to become God, or Absolute Will, elucidating this quest in many letters, aphorisms, and essays. Yet among Klíma's fictional texts, the apotheosis of his philosophy is The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch, his most acclaimed novel. Ostensibly a series of journal entries, the tale chronicles the descent into madness of Prince Sternenhoch, the German Empire’s foremost aristocrat and favorite of Kaiser “Willy.” Having become the “lowliest worm” at the hands of his estranged wife, Helga, the Queen of Hells, Sternenhoch eventually attains an ultimate state of bliss and salvation through the most grotesque perversions. Klíma explores here the paradoxical nature of pure spirituality with a humor that is as darkly comical as it is obscene. This volume also includes his notorious text “My Autobiography.”

    Closely Watched Trains is the subtle and poetic portrait of Miloš Hrma, a timid young railroad apprentice who insulates himself with fantasy against a reality filled with cruelty and grief. Day after day as he watches trains fly by, he torments himself with the suspicion that he himself is being watched and with fears of impotency. Hrma finally affirms his manhood and, with a sense of peace and purpose he has never known before, heroically confronts a trainload of Nazis.Milan Kundera called the novel "an incredible union of earthly humor and baroque imagination." After receiving acclaim as a novel, Closely Watched Trains was made into an internationally successful film that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film of 1967. This edition includes a foreword by Josef Škvorecký.

    The Cowards is the story of an uncomplicated, talented youth caught up in momentous historic events who refuses either to be bored to death by politics - or to lie down and die without a fight.

    Together they must play out a game in which the stakes are their lives. The New York Times called this book "A heartstopping parable" and The Washington Post said "Majestic, never to be forgotten."

    When it is announced that the Inspector General is coming to visit incognito, Anton, the chief of police, hastens to clean up the town before his arrival. Local officials scurry to hide evidence of bribe-taking and other misdeeds, setting the stage for the arrival from St. Petersburg of Ivan, a penurious gambler and rake who is promptly taken by the townspeople to be the dreaded Inspector General. Ivan, and his servant, Osip, soon take advantage of the situation with hilarious results. First performed in 1836, the play transcends regional and national boundaries to offer a biting, highly entertaining glimpse of universal human foibles and failings.

    --- The great French writer Romain Rolland (1866-1944, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1915) wrote his famous tragic love story "Pierre and Luce" at the end of World War I. Its protagonists recall the lovers of classical antiquity as well as those of the Middle Ages.

    Invited to the family seat--Pendragon Castle in North Wales--Batky receives a mysterious phone call warning him not to go; but he does and finds himself in a bizarre world of mysticism, romance, animal experimentation, and planned murder. His quest to solve the central mystery takes him down strange byways--old libraries and warehouse cellars, Welsh mountains, and underground tombs.

    The Other City is a guidebook to this invisible, "other Prague," overlapping the workaday world: a place where libraries can turn into jungles, secret passages yawn beneath our feet, and waves lap at our bedspreads. Heir to the tradition and obsessions of Jorge Luis Borges, as well as the long and distinguished line of Czech fantasists, Ajvaz's Other City—his first novel to be translated into English—is the emblem of all the worlds we are blind to, being caught in our own ways of seeing.

    Drawing on Matthew Lewis's The Monk, Sade's Justine, K.H. Macha's May, and Murnau's Nosferatu as well as the form and language of the pulp serial novel, Nezval has constructed a lyrical, menacing dream of sexual awakening involving a vampire with a taste for chicken blood, changelings, a lecherous priest, a malicious grandmother desiring her lost youth, and an androgynous merging of brother with sister.In his Foreword Nezval states: "I wrote this novel out of a love of the mystique in those ancient tales, superstitions and romances, printed in Gothic script, which used to flit before my eyes and declined to convey to me their content." Part fairy tale, part Gothic horror, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a meditation on youth and age, sexuality and death — an exploration of the grotesque that juxtaposes high and low genres, with shifting registers of language and moods that was a trademark of the Czech avant-garde. The 1970 film version is considered one of the outstanding achievements of Czech new-wave cinema.

    Playing cards and getting drunk, he uses all his cunning and genial subterfuge to deal with the police, clergy, and officers who chivy him toward battle.Cecil Parrott's vibrant translation conveys the brilliant irreverence of this classic about a hapless Everyman caught in a vast bureaucratic machine.

    The Saroyan story was transplanted from New York to 1950s San Francisco for the musical.