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The path of medium sinfulness
by Viola Fischerová
A young boy wonders where souls go after they die. Decides to sin a little bit, in a moral compromise, so that he could join his pet dog in animal heaven.
Trans. Nancy Hawker
[about Nancy Hawker]
[excerpt]

Elegy
by Alena Vostrá
A young woman looks for a relationship and avoids it at the same time, developped in a conversation with herself and with others, set in Prague of the 1960s.
Trans. Nancy Hawker

Owlet
by Květa Legátová:
A young girl living in a remote Moravian village deals with the cruelty of children and the despondency of her alcoholic father.
Trans. Madelaine Hron

How I went to school
by Tera Fabiánová
The author describes in a sweet and humorous way her first years of education as a Roma child in a small Czech village just before World War II. Racism and social exclusion was the norm but heart-warming exceptions existed.
Trans. from Roma David Chirico

Mininovella
by Alexandra Berková
A young woman is pregnant and is not sure whether she wants to stay with the father, get an abortion or be a single mother. The father gets involved as well as his mother, his lover, her lover, and a friend, joining in a fragmented conversation, related to us by the unborn daughter.
Trans. Kathleen Hayes

One Pistachio Ice Cream
by Anna Zonová
A woman rebels against her pedantically orderly husband and he is bewildered. She decides to drink vodka for breakfast instead of the healthy muesli-and-skimmed-milk he always prepares. They make love but that also confuses him, since this activity is reserved for Thursdays, and it is only Tuesday!
Trans. Alexandra Büchler

Spades
by Věra Stiborová
Three men play cards over many bottles of wine and as they use psychological tactics to win, resentment, resignation, and despair grows between them. One of them resorts to inventing a glorious military past for himself, so that the other players let him win out of respect and awe, but this arrangement does not last...
Trans. Charles Sabatos

The Forrest
by Kateřina Rudčenková
The author depicts her problematic relationship with her mother, her forces her to study agricultural engineering, while she aspires to be a poet.
Trans. Alexandra Büchler

Every Civilisation has its Heyday
by Magdaléna Platzová
Young woman intent on becoming a film star finds herself involved with the Yugoslav mafia. Her father discovers the truth while her mother clings to illusions of grandeur.
Trans. Kathleen Hayes

A day in the life of class 4.D.
by Kateřina Sidonová
Cynical teenagers do what they deem fit with a schoolday in the last years of the communist regime. They recite the works of communist propagandists and secretly smoke in the toilets. Written by the daughter of the dissident and Rabbi Karol Sidon. Hilarious slang and perceptive depiction.
Trans. Mark Corner

All the Colours of the Sun and the Night
by Lenka Reinerová
Memoirs of a woman from a German-speaking Jewish family of Prague who survived the Second World War only to find herself persecuted by the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia of the 1950s.
Trans. from German Nicole Balmer

A Child
by Erika Olahová
A Roma woman is shunned by her community because she is barren but she finally becomes pregnant after being raped by her father-in-law. The child is born as an incarnation of evil.
Trans. Nancy Hawker

Don't tell mum
by Svatava Antošová
A woman abused in childhood is trapped in successions of violent relationships, in a vicious circle of lost self-respect, crime and underground culture, couched in the appropriate slang.
Trans. Craig Cravens

Divine Trumpets and Barbed is the Wire in the Sudetenland
by Sabrina Karasová
Two very short stories by this author, the editor of Czech Cosmopolitan.
Divine Trumpets: A woman is in the pit of despair until salvation comes in the form of pickled men's buttocks.
Barbed is the Wire in the Sudetenland A metaphor for the problematic social situation in the Czech borderland.
Trans. Nancy Hawker

Czech Writers