Search results for ""Author David Short""

Discover a new and effective way to learn Czech. With 19 units covering the four key skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening, this best-selling course comprises a book and free online audio support.

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The design of Prague's gardens and parks especially the green spaces of its palaces, castles, and monastery complexes, both private and public is inseparable from the millennium-long efflorescence of this exquisite Czech metropolis. Lushly illustrated with nearly one hundred and fifty original color photographs and archival images, Prague: Parks and Gardens not only shares the latest findings on these gardens' historical foundation and stylistic transformations, but also takes us through the garden gates into individual gardens and parks both Prague's most visited and its undiscovered green gems. Meandering past flower-framed baroque statues to renaissance loggias, romantic pavilions, elegant stairways, and bubbling fountains, the book explores Prague's gardens and parks by locality, offering novel insight into the city's different sections that will delight all educated travelers and lovers of Prague. For gardeners, descriptions of some historical gardens also include explanations of their specific spatial relations, connecting them to the larger story of European urban garden design. Complemented with a glossary of terms and an index of important figures and locations, this beautiful celebration of Prague's remarkable living botanical art, both past and present, sheds new light on the leafy corners of this adored European capital.

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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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Written in the first four months of the war in Ukraine, fuelled by anger towards mindless violence, Nemec’s stories tackle the present moment and confront what really matters at times of abundant destruction. A Czech man in Ukraine in search of his alter ego. A gang of homeless kids driven from a cellar by tenants using it as a shelter from the war. A German couple who ‘rented a womb’ in Ukraine, whose child is now stuck in Kyiv. A teenager partnered with a Valkyrie for the distribution of lavash in besieged Mariupol delays his flight until it is too late. A Russian academic mounting a protest in the center of Moscow dressed in a costume from Swan Lake. They may not be soldiers at the front, but for the characters in these stories, life will never again be as it was before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In this collection of short stories—two set in Ukraine, two in the West, and one in Russia—Czech author Jan Nemec has produced a work of remarkable immediacy.

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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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Novelist Bohumil Hrabal was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and he spent decades working at a variety of laboring jobs before turning to writing in his late forties. From that point, he quickly made his mark on the Czech literary scene; by the time of his death he was ranked with Jaroslav Hasek, Karel Capek, and Milan Kundera as among the nation's greatest twentieth-century writers. Hrabal's fiction blends tragedy with humor and explores the anguish of intellectuals and ordinary people alike from a slightly surreal perspective. His work ranges from novels and poems to film scripts and essays. Rambling On is a collection of stories set in Hrabal's Kersko. Several of the stories were written before the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague but had to be reworked when they were rejected by Communist censorship during the 1970s. This edition features the original, uncensored versions of those stories.

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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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This is a book about collective guilt, individual fate, and repentance, a tale that explores how we can come to be responsible for crimes we neither directly commit nor have the power to prevent. Set in the Czechoslovakian borderland shortly after WWII amid the sometimes violent expulsion of the region's German population, Jaroslav Durych's poetic, deeply symbolic novel is a literary touchstone for coming to terms with the Czech Republic's difficult and taboo past of state-sanctioned violence. A leading Catholic intellectual of the early twentieth century, Durych became a literary and political throwback to the prewar Czechoslovak Republic and faced censorship under the Stalinist regime of the 1950s. As such, he was a man not unfamiliar with the ramifications of a changing society in which the minority becomes the rule-making political authority, only to end up condemned as criminals. Though Durych finished writing God's Rainbow in 1955, he could not have hoped to see it published in his lifetime. Released in a still-censored form in 1969, God's Rainbow is available here in full for the first time in English.

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