Magdaléna Platzová and Tomáš Zmeškal at the Brooklyn Book Festival

The Czech authors will be speaking at events on 18th September.

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Magdaléna Platzová will be taking part in a debate at 12pm on 18th September about geopolitical forces and their resistance, from Zuccotti Park to the offices of Lehman Brothers to the streets of the West Bank. An hour later, Tomáš Zmeškal will be discussing the complexities of love and marriage in both war and peace. More information about the events can be found here and here.

Attempt Magdalena-PlatzovaNew English translations of novels by both authors were published this year translated by Alex Zucker. In Platzová’s The Attempt, a Czech historian becomes convinced he’s the illegitimate great-grandson of an infamous anarchist who attempted an assassination while living in the United States and travels to New York to investigate. Emma Garman in Words Without Borders described the novel as “a powerfully distilled meditation on the meaning of freedom, a ferocious complexity lurking beneath its smooth and hypnotically readable surface.”

love letter cuneiform zmeskalZmeškal’s EU Prize for Literature-winning Love Letter in Cuneiform is set in Czechoslovakia between the 1940s and the 1990s and focuses on one family’s tragic story of love and the unspoken. M.A.Orthofer wrote in The Complete Review that “[Love Letter in Cuneiform] is a very fine novel of (a few slices of) Czech life in the second half of the twentieth century, with a nice balance of the wildly imagined and the all-too-real.”

CzechLit