Czech Literature in Translation

Under the Garrigue Books imprint, Catbird Press has published a large selection of
Czech literature in translation. Our principal Czech author is the prewar novelist, playwright,
and story writer Karel Čapek, but we have also published postwar contemporary fiction writers
Vladimír Páral, Jáchym Topol, Daniela Fischerová, and Alexandr Kliment, and we've done
an excellent collection of recent fiction by the younger generations of Czech writers,
Daylight in Nightclub Inferno and an excellent novel by the prewar writer Karel Poláček

We also have two volumes translated from the Spanish,
one novel translated from the German, and an overview of the art of literary translation.

Karel Čapek
Vladimír Páral
Jáchym Topol
Jaroslav Seifert
 Daniela Fischerová
Alexandr Kliment
Karel Poláček


Karel Čapek
Click author's name to see much more information about his books, including excerpts and first chapters.


WAR WITH THE NEWTS. Translated by Ewald Osers.
One of the great anti-utopian satires of the twentieth century.

TOWARD THE RADICAL CENTER: A Karel Čapek Reader.
Edited by Peter Kussi, Foreword by Arthur Miller.
A collection of Čapek's best plays, stories, and columns.

APOCRYPHAL TALES. Translated by Norma Comrada.
Fresh approaches to historical and literary figures.

TALES FROM TWO POCKETS. Translated by Norma Comrada.
Mystery stories like no others.

THREE NOVELS: Hordubal, Meteor, An Ordinary Life. Translated by M. & R. Weatherall.
Čapek's great trilogy about personal identity.

TALKS WITH T. G. MASARYK. Translated by Michael Henry Heim.
An unusual biographical approach to the founder of Czechoslovakia.

CROSS ROADS. Translated by Norma Comrada.
Two collections of early stories in one volume.


Vladimír Páral
Click author's name to see much more information about his books, including excerpts and first chapters.

CATAPULT. Translated by William Harkins.
A delightful, yet tragic twist on the Don Juan story.

THE FOUR SONYAS. Translated by William Harkins.
In Paral's darkly comic world, people will do almost anything to attain their dreams.

LOVERS & MURDERERS. Translated by Craig Cravens.
Another darkly humorous novel about what people will do to each other to make their dreams come horribly true.


Other Czech Literature in Translation

CITY SISTER SILVER by Jáchym Topol. Translated by Alex Zucker.
A powerful novel of post-communist dislocation by the best young Czech writer.

$19.95 paper, 512 pages, ISBN 0-945774-45-1. Also available as an e-book.

"City Sister Silver is a first novel the way The Tin Drum and Midnight's Children
were first novels— a prodigal astonishment; an emancipation proclamation."
—John Leonard, Newsday


FINGERS POINTING SOMEWHERE ELSE by Daniela Fischerová. Translated by Neil Bermel. Seven meticulously crafted stories from the first Czech baby boomer to have a book appear in English.

$19.95 cloth, 176 pages, ISBN 0-945774-44-3. Also available as an e-book.

"The range of tone and material in this collection of seven short stories
attests to Fischerová’s mastery of the genre … Adroitly translated by Bermel, this
collection is an excellent introduction to one of the most influential Czech writers
in the literary generation following that of Milan Kundera."
—Publishers Weekly


THE POETRY OF JAROSLAV SEIFERT. Translated by Ewald Osers; edited and with prose translations by George Gibian. The largest collection in English of works from throughout the life of the Czech Nobel Prize-winning poet.

$14.95 paper, 255 pp., ISBN 0-945774-39-7. Also available as an e-book.

"Seifert's three great subjects are the beauties of women, art, his nation.
He characteristically celebrates all three within a single poem."
—Booklist
LIVING PARALLEL by Alexandr Kliment. Translated by Robert Wechsler, Foreword by Ivan Klíma. A beautiful, reflective novel about an unusual love triangle: man, woman, countryside.

$21 cloth, 238 pages, ISBN 0-945774-51-6. Also available as a free e-book.

"Elegant, absorbing, and simply beautiful …
[by] the aristocrat of Czech dissident literature."
—Josef Škvorecký


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