Search results for ""Author Jáchym Topol""

A brutally funny, carnivalesque novel about love, death, and survival, from the Czech Republic’s greatest living author Tab, an itinerant Czech actor, travels around Europe on the theater circuit with his partner, Soňa, and their two young sons, attending festivals and performing plays. Confronted with growing resentment toward foreigners, Tab decides to return home to the banks of the Sázava River, southeast of Prague. As soon as they arrive, Tab finds himself falsely accused of a terrible crime and forced to go on the run with his sons. Over the course of their journey, dodging authorities by car, foot, and raft, they encounter a motley cast of allies and enemies. The effects of Tab’s sudden reappearance and just-as-sudden disappearance ripple through the community, catalyzing a chaotic chain of events that reaches a final, raucous crescendo. Hailed as “a picaresque romp of black humor and fantasy” (Times Literary Supplement), this is an unforgettable novel about discovering sparks of humanity even in the bleakest of places, in which love or the longing to find it lies around every bend.

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Angel Station takes its title from the bustling Metro stop in the Prague district of Smíchov. Until the gentrification of the late 1990s, it was a rough-and-tumble, working-class neighborhood with a sizeable Roma and Vietnamese population. Topol’s novel, in sparse yet poetic language-agilely brought into English by the author’s longtime translator Alex Zucker-weaves together the brutal and disturbing fates of an addict, a shopkeeper, and a religious fanatic as they each follow the path they hope will lead them to serenity: drugs, money, and faith.

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Compassion, levity, and laughter can be found in the darkest of places--and even in the smallest of creatures. Set in 1943 Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, J. R. Pick's novella Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals tells the story of Tony, a thirteen-year-old boy who is deported from Prague to the infamous Terezi-n ghetto for Jews--the horrific, overcrowded concentration camp where one in four prisoners died of starvation or disease, and a way station on the way to Auschwitz. But it is not the atrocities Tony experiences that make his tale remarkable. It is his ability to find comedy in the incomprehensible. Tony suffers from tuberculosis, and, lying in his hospital bed one day, he decides to set up an animal welfare organization. Even though no animals are permitted in the camp, he is determined to find just one creature he can care for and protect--and his determination is contagious. A group of older boys including Tony's best friend, Ernie, aid him in his quest. Soon they're joined by Tony's mother--and her coterie of boyfriends. Eventually, they find Tony his pet: a mouse, which he names and carefully guards in a box hidden beneath his bed. But in the fall of 1944, the transports to Auschwitz begin. As moving as it is irreverent, Pick's novella draws on the two years he spent imprisoned in Terezi-n in his late teens. With cutting black humor, he shines a light on both the absurdities and injustices of the Nazi-run Jewish ghetto, using his literary artistry to portray in stunning shorthand an experience of the Holocaust that pure histories could never convey.

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