Winner, 1998 PEN Center USA West Award for Translation Josef Hirsal's experimental novel is a Dada-like romp through the life of a young man born into a Bohemian peasant family. Told in five parts, "A Bohemian Youth" begins with a word to the wise, moves on to the text, continues with notes and with[...]

Computers have dramatically altered life in the late twentieth century. Today we can draw on worldwide computer links, speeding up communications by radio, newspapers, and television. Ideas fly back and forth and circle the globe at the speed of electricity. And just around the corner lurks full-bl[...]

Rake, drunkard, aesthete, gossip, raconteur extraordinaire: the narrator of Bohumil Hrabal's rambling, rambunctious masterpiece "Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age" is all these and more. Speaking to a group of sunbathing women who remind him of lovers past, this elderly roue tells the story of[...]

Collection of Jan Neruda's intimate, wry, bitter-sweet stories of life among the inhabitants of Mala Strana, the Little Quarter of nineteenth century Prague. These finely tuned and varied vignettes established Neruda as the quintessential Czech nineteenth century realist, the Charles Dickens of a Pr[...]