Written at the height of Czech Surrealism, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a bizarre erotic fantasy of a young girl’s maturation into womanhood.

Literary fiction

Referencing Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Marquis de Sade’s Justine, K. H. Macha’s May, F. W. Murnau’s film Nosferatu, Nezval employs the language of the pulp serial novel to fashion a lyrical, menacing dream of sexual awakening involving a vampire with an insatiable appetite for chicken blood, changelings, lecherous priests, a malicious grandmother desiring her lost youth. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders was originally written in 1935 but not published until 1945.

(Synopsis adapted from the English edition published by Twisted Spoon Press)