Karel Čapek (1890-1938) is generally considered the greatest Czech author of the first half of the 20th century. This volume includes a selection of Čapek's best plays, stories, columns, essays, and travel writing, all newly translated or modernized and corrected.In his writings, Čapek searched for the root, or the radical center, of our contradictions and mysteries. From a paean to clumsy people and the discovery of a single footprint in an untrodden field of snow, to dramatic med...

"What Ownership's All About" is a darkly humorous novel about what power, even a tiny amount of it, does to a person, and to the people under his thumb. Jan Faktor, a policeman, builds a three-family house on the outskirts of Prague. He begins to landlord it over his tenants, and they respond by fearfully conceding to his increasingly absurd demands, and by huffing and puffing for all they're worth.Poláček's unerring use of colloquial language, in Peter Kussi's excellent translatio...

The New York Times bestseller by the author of legendary cult classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being.'Like all great writers, Kundera leaves indelible marks on his readers' imaginations.' Salman RushdieFrom a playful gesture between an old woman in a swimming pool and a youthful lifeguard springs the heroine of a novel: Agnès. In the course of her daily life - Saturday chores, saunas, lunch in the hectic Paris ...

Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore thoroughly the great themes of exis...

**Winner of the National Book Award"The most profound and accomplished American novel since the end of World War II." —The New Republic**“A screaming comes across the sky. . .” A few months after the Germans’ secret V-2 rocket bombs begin falling on London, British Intelligence discovers that a map of the city pinpointing the sexual conquests of one Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, U.S. Army, corresponds identically to a map showing the V-2 impact sites. The implication...

Huxley's dystopian classic is a nightmare vision of the fate of humanity in a post-nuclear world.After a devastating global catastrophe, a group of scientists arrives in a ruined future shaped by fear, ritual and violence. Humanity has survived – but at a terrible cost, and not in any form they recognise. Ape and Essence is Aldous Huxley’s bleak, satirical vision of civilisation after collapse. Fierce, strange and provocative, it confronts the destructive ...

'She turns her head and smiles. Something is wrong with her face. The bones have been recarved. Her lips are thin and her nose is a dark blade. Teeth small and yellow. The lashes of her hazel eyes have thickened and her brows are drawn together, an expression he has never seen, a look that is almost craven.'Mrs Fox is the story of a husband who is shocked out of his complacency when his wife undergoes a remarkable transformation."The poetic use of language, the dexterity an...

R.U.R. - written in 1920, premiered in Prague in 1921, and first performed in New York in 1922 - garnered worldwide acclaim for its author and popularized the word 'robot'. Mass-produced as efficient laborers to serve man, Capek's Robots are an android product-they remember everything but think of nothing new. But the Utopian life they provide ultimately lacks meaning, and the humans they serve stop reproducing. When the Robots revolt, killing all but one of their masters,...

Unforgiving Years is a thrilling and terrifying journey into the disastrous, blazing core of the twentieth century. Victor Serge’s final novel, here translated into English for the first time, is at once the most ambitious, bleakest, and most lyrical of this neglected major writer’s works.The book is arranged into four sections, like the panels of an immense mural or the movements of a symphony. In the first, D, a lifelong revolutionary who has broken with the Communist Pa...

Nineteen writers dig into the imaginative spaces between conventional genres—realistic and fantastical, scholarly and poetic, personal and political—and bring up gems of new fiction: interstitial fiction.This is the literary mode of the new century, a reflection of the complex, ambiguous, and challenging world that we live in. These nineteen stories, by some of the most interesting and innovative writers working today, will change your mind about what stories can and should do as t...

Part prophecy and part erotic fantasy, this classic tale of otherworldly depravity features New York itself—or a foreigner's nightmare of New York—as its true protagonist. Set in the towers and tunnels of the quintessential American city, Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel turns this urban space into a maze where politics bleeds into perversion, revolution into sadism, activist into criminal, vice into art—and back again. Following the logic of a movie half-glimpsed through a haze of drugs and al...

Modernism gave us Yeats and Picasso, Stravinsky and Balanchine—and it gave us Guy Davenport, perhaps its finest and most neglected heir, whose four decades of fiction, poetry, essays, and translations are collected here in paperback for the very first time*"The imagination is like the drunk man who has lost his watch, and must get drunk again to find it. It is as intimate as speech and custom, and to trace its ways we need to re–educate our eyes." —*Guy Davenport