Literary fiction  |  English sample translation available

A novel written from the wreckage of a relationship while reconsidering ways of writing about love.

In his new novel Jan Němec exposes himself in an unprecedented manner as he examines the beginning, middle and end of a six-year relationship – his own. The book, which emerged from the need to understand what went wrong with him and his girlfriend, shows how the death of a relationship can spill over into the birth of a novel as a kind of self-preserving literary reincarnation. Ways of Writing about Love is enhanced by various narrative tricks and techniques, allusions to iconic works of prose, extracts from letters and news reports. This intimate and slightly controversial novel, where the author, narrator and central character meld into one, breaks all the rules of narration, testing the forms which prose can take.

Jan Němec (1981) is a novelist, journalist and screenwriter. He studied sociology, religious studies and theatre dramaturgy. He has worked with the magazine Respekt and the Czech Radio. He is the managing editor at the monthly literary magazine Host and lectures at the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno. He has published a collection of poetry, První život (The First Life, 2007), a book of short stories, Hra pro čtyři ruce (A Game for Four Hands, 2009), and the novel Dějiny světla (A History of Light, 2013), which was awarded the EU Prize for Literature, has been translated into twelve languages, including English, Spanish and German. In 2019, he published his second novel, Možnosti milostného románu (Ways of Writing about Love).