Search results for ""Jantar Publishing Ltd""

The reader arrives in Adam Bodor's world, the periphery of civilization, at the break of dawn. Adam, the foster son of Brigadier Anatol Korkodus is waiting at the dilapidated station for a boy who is arriving from a reformatory. Soon afterwards, Korkodus is arrested for unfathomable reasons. Yet this decaying and sinister world is not devoid of a certain joie de vivre: people eat gourmet dishes, point out their interlocutor's hidden motives with incredibly dark humor and enjoy the region's stunning natural beauty.

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Translated by David Short Foreword by Rajendra Chitins Burying the Season is an affectionate, multi-layered account of small town life in central Europe beginning in the early 1930s and ending in the 21st Century. Adapting scenes from Fellini’s Amarcord, Bajaja’s meandering narrative weaves humour, tragedy and historical events into a series of compelling nostalgic anecdotes. The ex-King of Bulgaria, a future president with the unfortunate name Goose, strange visitors and eccentric locals are just a few of the peculiar, but very human, characters drawn by the author experiencing the wonder and disillusionment of their everyday lives. Zlín, Bajaja’s hometown, with its Bauhaus inspired architecture, built by its major employer Baťa Shoes, feature prominently. Friends and family walk, skate, swim, quarrel, love and fall into the local river Dřevnice; disappearing and re-appearing, surviving changing times while their children play Swallows and Amazons. As an essay in remembering, it offers hope.

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A noble misfit investigates a powerful party figure in 1950s Czechoslovakia. His struggle against blackmail and betrayal leaves him determined to succeed where others have failed. Set in Stalinist Central Europe, GraveLarks is an intellectual thriller navigating the ambiguity between sado-masochism, black humour, political satire, murder and hope.

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Barcode, Krisztina Toth's first substantial work in prose after four volumes of remarkable verse, consists of fifteen beautifully written and highly sensual short stories. Each story, apart from one, is told with poetic intensity and intimacy from a young, unnamed female narrator's point of view.

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Blanka takes a summer job at a centre for people with physical disabilities in the French city of Marseille, where her encounter with their severe conditions ends badly. A deeply unsettling, visceral tale of a young woman unravelling, evolving from carer to cared for. A novel about our own inability to escape ‘our own private cages’, imprisoned by fear, anxiety and mistrust, no less than indifference to others. The author: IVANA DOBRAKOVOVÁ (1982) graduated from Bratislava's Comenius University with a degree in English and French (translation and interpretation). She is based in Turin where she works as a freelance translator from French and Italian into Slovak, currently working on Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. She debuted in 2009 with her short story collection Prvá smrť v rodine (The First Death in the Family), followed by the novel Bellevue (2010). Her most recent collection of short stories Toxo appeared in 2013. She has won several literary competitions, including Poviedka 2008, and all three of her books have been shortlisted for the Anasoft Litera prize. In 2019, she was awarded the EU Prize for Literature.

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International diplomacy has stopped working. A new breed of authoritarian ruler has emerged, contemptuous of the rules of diplomacy and collective security, and willing to lie and bully to build power and influence. Europe’s democracies are confused and defensive. It is 1938 and Germany is putting pressure on Czechoslovakia.

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Balla is often described as “the Slovak Kafka” for his depictions of the absurd and the mundane. In the Name of the Father features a nameless narrator reflecting on his life, looking for someone else to blame for his failed relationship with his parents and two sons, his serial adultery, the breakup of his marriage and his wife’s descent into madness. Against the backdrop of their stiflingly grey provincial lives, he completely fails to act against “the thing” growing in the cellar of the house he built with his brother. The book won numerous awards in Slovakia and in this edition is accompanied by three additional short stories, which share its unique dark humour, satire and truth.

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Agnieszka Dale's characters all want to find greatness, but they realise greatness isn't their thing. But what is? And what is great anyway? In Peek-a-boo, a mother breastfeeds her child via Skype, at work. In Hello Poland, a man reunites with his daughter in a world where democracy has been replaced by user testing. In other short stories, people bow and are bowed to. They feed foxes or go fishing. They kiss the fingers of those they love while counting to ten.

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This novel about the twentieth century begins when time was linear and ends when the notion of progress becomes less well defined. "It strikes me that Josef Brehme lived in an epoch when time still proceeded in a straight line from the past to the future," muses his grandson, the talented, handsome, and cynical Alex Brehme, in his diary in late 2001. The Brehmes' story guides the reader through revolution, war, the Holocaust, and ultimately exile and return. A novel about what man does to man and whether God intervenes. Translated by Gerald Turner. "remarkable"-Vaclav Havel.

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The reader arrives in Adam Bodor's world, the periphery of civilization, at the break of dawn. Adam, the foster son of Brigadier Anatol Korkodus is waiting at the dilapidated station for a boy who is arriving from a reformatory. Soon afterwards, Korkodus is arrested for unfathomable reasons. Yet this decaying and sinister world is not devoid of a certain joie de vivre: people eat gourmet dishes, point out their interlocutor's hidden motives with incredibly dark humor and enjoy the region's stunning natural beauty.

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Alice returns from her death to act as witness and participant in Prague's tumultuous history from its foundation to 1989. History's losers return to watch the victors enjoy and lose their spoils. An unusual quest for self, for one's place in life, and in the world, a world that is embodied in Prague.

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Andrič and his girlfriend Laura have been seeing each other for a long time now but it isn’t clear what each sees in the other. Self-absorbed, delusional or just a regular couple? ‘Big Love is primarily a critique of contemporary society, in which the triumph of liberal democracy has increased rather than diminished the Kafkaesque aspects of life.’ – Charles Sabatos.

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Karol and his wife are the rising stars of the Polish community in London but Karol is a ruthless entrepreneur whose fortune is built on the backs of his fellow countrymen. The Kulesza brothers, mentally unstable Igor and his violent brother Damian, dream about returning to Poland one day. A loving couple, Mateusz and Angelika, believe against all odds that good things will happen to people like them. Gradually, all of these lives become dramatically entwined, and each of them will have to decide how far they are willing to go in pursuit of their dreams. Insightful and unforgiving, Children of Our Age is a deeply human and timely story of Polish immigrants. Sweeping between their past in Poland and their present in Britain, this electrifying novel explores the ways unlikely encounters transform lives, the limits of loyalty, and love.

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Prague, I see a city...is a novel of quest, in which the heroine abandons the material world of everyday society and linear history, perceiving it as false, temporary and distracting, and journeys in search of her true identity. Suffused with the atmosphere immediately following the end of the Communist regime, Hodrova's novel is a conscious addition to the tradition of Prague literary texts by, for example, Karel Hynek Macha, Jakub Arbes, Gustav Meyrink, and Franz Kafka, who present the city as a hostile living creature, or as a labyrinthine place of magic and mystery, in which the individual human being may easily get lost. Translated by David Short.

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Written and published in 1856, before Jules Verne published any of his novels. A young explorer sets off to map the stars in a balloon. The first ever SF novel written in Slovak.

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Dead is Balla's most recent book and marks a glorious return to the short story form. The stories are very topical dealing with the theme of masculinity, how that is expressed in different forms of aggressive nationalism, Slovak 'nativism' and delusional male interior monologues.

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A young man creates his own time machine and travels back in time to witness battles between Prussia and Austria. The first ever SF novel written in Czech by the celebrated Modernist author Jakub Arbes.

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The unloved wife of a doctor practising in Slovakia comes across his medical notes after his death. One `unofficial patient’ has severe problems coming to terms with the disappearance and murder of his childhood sweetheart. Set in Slovakia from the mid-1970s onwards, historical fact, murder, loss and mourning combine delicately in a tale of love, loss, redemption and joy.

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A drunken teacher dreams up a hairbrained scheme to dig a tunnel from Ukraine to Hungary to force the EU to grant Ukraine admission by smuggling its entire population into a member country. Hilarity inevitably ensues, along with danger, when Tys, the would-be 'Moses of Ukraine', recruits a gang of local smugglers, including a latter-day Icarus determined to fly over the border and a femme fatale who traffics human organs.

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A foul-mouthed Prague prostitute muses on her profession, aging and the nature of materialism as imagined in her own reality TV series. In an unvarnished mixture of vulgar and poetic language, the episodes combine the mundane with fetishism, violence and dark humour.

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Daniela Hodrova shares her unique perception of Prague, through playful poetic prose, and by imaginatively blending historical and cultural motifs with autobiographical moments. A Kingdom of Souls is the first volume of this author's literary journey - an unusual quest for self, for one's place in life and in the world; a world that for Hodrova is embodied in Prague. Translated by Veronique Firkusny and Elena Sokol.

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