The talented writer has transformed a traumatic experience into superb prose on a consistently neglected and explosive subject.

Františka is eleven years old and it’s a few years since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Now there is the freedom to follow her dreams. Františka finds a path to her dream of being an actress opening up through a drama club – and, of course, through Mirek, who’s in charge of it. He’s the only one who can prepare her for auditions. Get all he can out of her, practice perfect self-denial so she can be all she can be…

Hana D. Lehečková’s Buds is set in the strange, predatory and naive period of the post-communist years, when the energy of society mingled with a lack of awareness of the pitfalls in the liberal view of relationships and intimacy. The atmosphere of the period contributes to the dynamics of the story, whose subject is the sexual abuse of children. Lehečková has managed to convincingly capture the straightforward world of a still childish way of thinking, a world that comes across as almost brash and rude – but only until we realize how much more chilling the insidious manipulation by an adult is; what a powerful influence can be wielded by the leader of a drama club mostly attended by girls. Girls who are too old to be under their parents’ constant supervision but too immature to see through the psychological tricks of a sexual predator. After all, when he’s smart, funny, well-read and adored by the girls’ parents… Who would believe them?

]]> https://www.czechlit.cz/en/book/poupatka-en/feed/ 0 https://www.czechlit.cz/en/book/vrazdy-v-kruhu-divky-nalehko-en/ https://www.czechlit.cz/en/book/vrazdy-v-kruhu-divky-nalehko-en/#comments Wed, 21 Dec 2016 12:03:48 +0000 CzechLit http://www.czechlit.cz/book/ A dead girl, dressed only in light lingerie, is discovered in a private garden. The circumstances seem to point towards a sexually... ]]>

A dead girl, dressed only in light lingerie, is discovered in a private garden. The circumstances seem to point towards a sexually motivated murder.

Eccentric commissioner Holina, who trusts his police intuition as well as the advice of his former love, the psychologist and astrologist Sabina, tries to infiltrate as deep as possible into the circle of people around the murdered Vietnamese girl. His investigation first leads to Prague’s SAPA Vietnamese marketplace (nicknamed Little Hanoi), but he soon discovers that there is much more at stake. Lightly Dressed Girls is the second book by Iva Procházková about commissioner Holina from Prague’s Murder Division, following Man at the Bottom. Procházková’s detective stories have also been turned into a popular series for Czech Television.

A fast-paced, sports-infused adventure about baseball, fair play and the dream of success

The word diamond is also used for a baseball field – and it is this diamond which children from two remote American mountain villages fight over at the end of an adventure story written by the English studies scholar Bára Dočkalová, originally as a script for a school play. The prose adaptation was successful not only in terms of its composition but in particular from the psychological perspective of the characters and the emphasis on the values held by the main character, eleven-year-old Luke: he is courageous and goes his own way. Even though he has a minor physical handicap he trains with determination and dreams that one day he will move up from the home team to the high-school select from a nearby town. A chance meeting with a professional baseball player not only changes the lives of several village boys but it also affects a long-standing feud between the neighbouring communities. At first Luke has to contend with great disappointment before being faced with the challenge of his life. This dynamic sports-themed story appeals to both boys and girls; the exciting story is made even more vivid by the introduction to each chapter with detailed drawings by Jindřich Janíček, a popular, award-winning book designer, comics illustrator and recipient of the Czech Grand Design.

Age 11+

Běsa is a many-layered existential drama that is a loose continuation of Malinka.

Běla and Sabina are identical twins. Their extraordinarily powerful childhood bond unravels because of a battle with drugs from which only one of the sisters will emerge victorious. Once that battle is over, their mother will be overwhelmed by self-pity as she expends most of her thoughts and love on the lost child. The other child loses her mother as well as her twin.

Vitalij was born in a Czech village in Ukraine, in the year of the girls’ birth. Now an adult, he decides to visit the home of his forebears, a land he longs to see. Once in Prague, however, he becomes involved with Luboš, a pimp and dealer in foreign workers who deprives him of all his illusions.

Then a child is born who connects the fates of all the protagonists, forcing them to reappraise their understanding of all it means to be a sister, a mother… and a father, too.

Following our feature devoted to literary fiction, the best of 2016 series continues with a selection of genre fiction titles. One of the aims of CzechLit is to give exposure to this type of literature, which in the Czech Republic can no longer be dismissed as light reading. These days, Czech detective stories, sci-fi and noir attract literary scholars, critics and foreign publishers as well as readers. After our extensive look at new Czech authors of crime fiction, the following selection from 2016 is further proof of the high standard of Czech genre writing.

Contents

Sci-fi/Fantasy

Chaim Cigan: Puzzle

Petra Stehlíková: The Listener

Crime/Detective

Michal Sýkora: It’s Not Over Yet

Iva Procházková: Lightly Dressed Girls

Jiří Březina: The Noonday Witch

Nela Rywiková: Children of Anger

Pavel Mandys (ed.): Prague noir

Chaim Cigan

Puzzle

(Torst, 504 pages)

Karol Sidon, author and Chief Rabbi of Prague, writes under the pen-name Chaim Cigan, as we are now aware, although when he published the first part of his tetralogy Out in the Sticks (Kde lišky dávají dobrou noc), Altschul’s Method (Altschulova metoda), under this ambiguous pseudonym, almost the entire Czech Republic made a big adventure out of searching for the author, for at the time the book came as a revelation… Puzzle is the third part of the tetralogy, combining science-fiction elements, adventure, mystery, philosophy and humour. The heroes of the series are trying to understand the implications of an experiment which lead to time-travel, the creation of parallel worlds and an infinite number of human copies. Those responsible for the original phenomenal discovery are struggling to reverse the effects of scientific temptation which led them to irresponsibly use the discoveries of their unleashed intelligence. Sidon’s books have come out in Polish and Dutch. We believe this is a long-term sure-fire bet.

Praise

“Sidon remains a master of dialogue and depicting the tension between the conventional and the erotic.”

— Milan Ducháček, Respekt

“[…] a sci-fi page-turner full of humorous and erotic scenes, historical or Judaic digressions and realistic dialogue about what causes a person to make a free choice and what far-reaching consequences it can have in history.”

— Daniel Konrád, Hospodářské noviny

Links

Author website: www.karolsidon.com
Publisher: www.torst.cz, torst@torst.cz

Petra Stehlíková

The Listener
Naslouchač

(Host, 380 pages)

Petra Stehlíková first self-published her books and has now been picked up by one of the largest publishing houses in the Czech Republic. From the outset her books have been successful among fantasy genre readers and young adults. After the Great War the world is divided into two parts, one is habitable and the other is contaminated by poisonous gases. The habitable half is protected by a shield that draws energy from a special mineral called glassite, but its excavation results in numerous disorders and deformities. Thirteen-year-old Ilan is one of the few to be born without any deformities. Since her childhood she has pretended to be a boy, so as not to be taken away from her family, and she hides under a habit with a mask that glass workers have to wear as a sign of subordination. Thanks to her ability to listen to glassite, she begins to learn glass polishing. She knows she has to hide her secret at any price from the twenty-five warrior foes who have enslaved her people, but she does not manage to hold her ground and slowly comes closer to these men and learns the truth that has been withheld from the glass workers for many years. The Listener is the first part of a planned series.

Praise

“[…] the author has created a fascinating story. The Listener is the bold equal of any foreign work.”

— Petra Machová, Dagon

“The world of listeners is definitely worth visiting, there is something special about this unique Czech dystopia.”

— Kateřina Stupková, Pevnost (June 2016)

Links

Publisher: nakladatelstvi.hostbrno.cz, blatna@hostbrno.cz

Michal Sýkora

It’s Not Over Yet
Ještě není konec

(Host, 288 pages)

A Czech detective novel starring the idiosyncratic Commissioner Marie Výrová, which the television serial Detectives from Holy Trinity (Detektivové od Nejsvětější Trojice) is based upon. Sýkora has already written two books with the same detectives, who are popular among readers and recognized by the critics. Regarding Sýkora’s previous novel, Blue Shadows (Modré stíny), Pavel Mandys wrote in Hospodářské noviny: “A plausible and non-trivial plot, with solid albeit sometimes exaggerated character details plus the art of keeping the reader in suspense.” The same goes for this novel.

It’s a hot August afternoon in 1987. The holidays are drawing to a close and twelve year old Hana Kolihová inadvertently witnesses a particularly brutal murder in her villa by the river on the outskirts of the city. The police catch the perpetrator remarkably quickly and nobody believes Hana’s claim that the murderer was in fact a strange green spirit, resembling the water-goblin from Karel Jaromír Erben’s collection of ballads, Kytice. This time, Police Commissioner Marie Výrová will be investigating a quarter-century old murder. After meeting Hana, who never recovered from the horrific experience, Výrová studies the case and realises that the investigators made a number of mistakes and that many of the inhabitants of the seemingly quiet villa may have had a motive and the opportunity to commit the shocking crime.

Praise

“A story that leads through a murder hunt down into the depths of human nature, enlivened by the author’s full-blooded writing, including some fine work with colloquial language. Michal Sýkora’s work is like Dylan’s albums Time Out of Mind and Tell Tale Signs, his Commissioner Výrová’s favourites – tranquil on the surface but dark and disorderly within.”

— Štěpán Kučera, Právo

Links

Publisher: nakladatelstvi.hostbrno.cz, blatna@hostbrno.cz

Iva Procházková

Lightly Dressed Girls
Dívky nalehko

(Paseka, 340 pages)

A murdered Vietnamese woman clad only in erotic lingerie is discovered in a private garden. The idiosyncratic police commissioner Holina, who sets as much store by his policeman’s intuition as the advice of his old flame Sabina, a psychologist and astrologer, tries to penetrate as deeply as possible into the circle of people surrounding the dead girl. However, Procházková never does anything just for effect; she uses the murder victim’s origins as the basis for a deeper probe into contemporary Czech society. What’s more, she knows how to depict believable characters that you can live with and sympathize with. Their inner life is just as important as the detective action. Lightly Dressed Girls once again features Major Holina from the Prague homicide division. This is the second part in a popular series which has been turned into a perhaps even more popular television series. The first part of Vraždy v kruhu [The Zodiac Murders], as the whole series is called, has already come out in Polish. Procházková’s work is regularly published in Germany and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. She has won numerous awards – e.g. five Golden Ribbons and two Magnesia Literas in the category of books for children and young people as well as the most prestigious German award for writing for children, the Friedrich Gerstäcker Prize.

Praise

“The detailed psychological depiction of the characters coupled with the engaging description of the atmosphere of Prague in winter give added value to this proper detective story and make it well worth buying, especially if you have a preference for Czech detective stories and are tired of alcoholic loners from dysfunctional families who spend more time fighting their own demons than solving cases.”

— Richard Spitzer, Centrum detektivky

“In Lightly Dressed Girls, Procházková tells the story not only from the investigator’s point of view but also that of other characters, who she has managed to portray very convincingly, just as she has with the setting of the Vietnamese community and houses of ill repute.”

— Martin Stručovský, E15

Links

Author website: www.ivaprochazkova.com
Publisher: paseka.cz, paseka@paseka.cz

Jiří Březina

The Noonday Witch
Polednice

(Motto, 224 pages)

This is Březina’s second book about detective Tomáš Volf after Time-barred (Promlčení). The author won the best Czech detective novel award in 2013 for his debut On the Hill (Na kopci). A dead girl is found on a housing estate. It should have been a routine case for rookie Volf and his inexperienced partner. However, the murderer, nicknamed the Noonday Witch after the slavic mythical character, continues to haunt the apartment blocks, only striking in broad daylight. Detective Volf knows he has to do everything in his powers to succeed in his new role: deal with his stubborn partner as well as his superiors, survive the July heat and above all catch the murderer before another dead body hits the hot pavement.

Praise

“The Noonday Witch continues to set the bar high. Once again, this is a very well written detective story which will keep you gripped from the first page to the last.”

— Lukáš Loužický, Kultura21.cz

“The most striking part of The Noonday Witch is the finale, which is highly emotive and won’t leave the reader cold. This makes The Noonday Witch the best novel that Jiří Březina has written to date. If he continues in a similar vein, we truly have something to look forward to.”

— Martin Stručovský, E15

Links

Author website: www.jiribrezina.cz
Publisher: www.motto.cz, motto@albatrosmedia.cz

Nela Rywiková

Children of Anger
Děti hněvu

(Host, 287 pages)

Rywiková builds on the success of her 2013 debut, which was well received by readers and critics. In it she also transported the reader to the outskirts of town, to a dilapidated building hidden somewhere within a former industrial complex in northern Silesia. This detective story described the fates of four neighbours who commit a crime while pursuing what seems to be the simplest path in life; its social dimension was obvious. It is the description of economically deprived and marginalized locations that is Rywiková’s strong suit, and the author demonstrates this in Children of Anger too. Although the first clues in the police investigation into a murder point almost without fail to a local oddball, the investigators gradually begin to untangle a complex web involving people from very different walks of life. On the one hand there is the modern “elite” represented by a local entrepreneur and a female politician, and on the other the gambler Pavel with his sister and father. The story is enriched by a narrative thread which goes back to pre-war times and not only reveals the background to the detective plot but also how easily a person can fall victim to anger, historical events and forgotten miscarriages of justice. It becomes apparent that there is much more connecting the characters than it first appeared.

Praise

“The style and social setting of Nela Rywiková’s dark and harsh detective novel […] resembles Scandinavian crime fiction. The author is from Ostrava and knows the environment she is describing well.”

— Alena Slezáková, MF Dnes

“Nela Rywiková is proving to be one of the most interesting new names in the resurgent genre of Czech crime fiction. She has a wonderful ability to incorporate the genius loci of her home town into her work, not only in the form of apposite descriptions of the setting but also in the way she organically links together different social groups.”

— Pavel Mandys, iLiteratura

Links

Publisher: nakladatelstvi.hostbrno.cz, blatna@hostbrno.cz

Pavel Mandys (ed.)

Prague noir
Praha noir

(Paseka, 304 pages)

Prague Noir contains short stories by fourteen leading Czech authors, exploring the many forms of Prague crimes, mysteries and secrets, continuing the rich tradition of detective and mystery fiction with Prague motifs. The result is a unique and stylistically varied collection of stories by well-known Czech authors as well as rising stars. The book is also an unusual guide to traditional and lesser-known Prague sights. Visit Charles Bridge with Miloš Urban, explore the mysterious world of the Jewish ghetto with Petr Stančík, read Petra Soukupová’s account of an unexplained disappearance in Stromovka park or follow Kateřina Tučková’s investigation into the dark past of an old house on the bank of the Vltava river. This volume, edited by literary critic Pavel Mandys, will be published in English in 2017 by the New York-based Akashic Books as part of their prestigious Noir series.

Praise

“Prague Noir is a success. Due to its variety and the way it plays with the genre the anthology will appeal to a wide range of readers. The book is also tangible proof that Czech authors are able to construct a good story and fulfil genre expectations.”

— Martin Stručovský, E15

“[Prague Noir] offers an excellent cross-section of, and introduction to, contemporary Czech writers.”

— Jarda Konáš, Aktuálně.cz

Links

Publisher: paseka.cz, paseka@paseka.cz

Cover image: A detail from the cover of Puzzle by Chaim Cigan

To provide an overview of Czech poetry from 2010 to 2020 in the usual way – i.e. by searching for key events, trends, currents, and styles – is by no means a straightforward task. Not that these events and trends were not already discernible at the end of 2020; they were, but the problem lies in the fact that they are not sufficient. It is difficult to define Czech poetry from recent years based on similar poetics or shared ideas. So rather than a detailed map, this text will be more of an aerial image capturing the general drift of individual features and passing over a number of details and differences.

The start of the first decade of the new millennium marked the tail end of discussions within the contemporary Czech poetry scene about socially engaged poetry, with attitudes finally being openly refined regarding its social role. What sparked interest were new trends (conceptual poetry, environmental poetry) which were starting to attract increased attention in the somewhat conservative Czech literary environment. But the most significant change to occur on the Czech literary scene within this decade was due to something beyond its control – the relentless totality of time. Within a relatively short period of time, several notable poets exited the scene forever; figures who had helped shape it over the decades, who were looked up to as great authorities, and who, in some cases, had still been actively contributing towards it till their last days (which is why this article will be structured according to generational lines, or even age/sociological generations, rather than purely literary generations).

The Greats Bow Out

A significant number of poets born back in the 1920s and 1930s left us: Zdeněk Rotrekl, Ludvík Kundera, Bohumila Grögerová, and Zbyněk Hejda. Practically the entire ‘Thirty-Six’ group disappeared, including its most famous member, Václav Havel (along with Jiří Kuběna, Viola Fischerová, and Josef Topol). Nearly all of the ‘1960s generation’ also departed – poets who had come to prominence during the ‘thaw’ of the Communist regime between 1960 and 1968: Jiří Gruša, Antonín Brousek, Pavel Šrut, Stanislav Dvorský, Zeno Kaprál, and Petr Král. Throughout the 2010s, Král had been one of the most artistically active members of this generation, an important voice in contemporary discussions (his essays and critiques are contained in the extensive volume Vlastizrady (Treasons, 2015), and also a great influence on a number of poets from the younger generation (Jakub Řehák in particular) with his post-surrealist poetics.

We also lost some prominent figures from the underground movement of the 1970s and 1980s, and with them their characteristic vigour and provocative expression straddling intimacy, the grotesque, politics, and spirituality. With his collections Semeniště zmrdů (A Breeding Ground of Fuckers, 2012) and Teteliště zmrdů (A Den of Fuckers, 2012), Milan Kozelka (1948–2014) managed to influence several poets from the youngest generation (especially Jan Těsnohlídek), who, among other things, took on board the idea of poetry having a socio-critical function. In Ivan M. Jirous (1944–2011) we lost an incredibly complex as well as influential character who served as a role model of authenticity with his uncompromising attitudes. Jirous even influenced poetry after 2010 with his posthumously published collections – Úloža, 2013; Magorův noční zpěv (Magor’s Night Singing), 2013; and Akrostichy (Acrostics), 2015.

Living Memory

The distinction of the doyen of Czech poetry goes to the still-active and prolific Karel Šiktanc (b. 1928), whose poetry collections continue to cultivate the sophisticated lyricism of language which confidently develops the heritage of Modernist poetry and carefully examines perhaps all stylistic levels of the Czech language. In his collections Horniny (Minerals, 2016) and Ubírati se (To Proceed, 2018), the poet notices metropolitan (i.e. Prague) mundanity, into which he allowsboth a trace of metaphysics and the existential weight of human fate to penetrate through fissures of fragmentary compositions.

From the aforementioned 1960s’ generation, it is Ivan Wernisch (b. 1942) who has made the deepest impression on contemporary poetry and continues with his whimsical and dreamlike postmodern poetics filled with allusions and mystification. With the collections S brokovnicí pod kabátem (With a Shotgun Under His Coat, 2014), Tiché město (The Silent City, 2016), and Pernambuco (2018), the poet has only intensified the characteristic metaliterary distancing of his poetic statement and ironic sneer at poetry as an area of a priori values and grandeur. Not least, for Wernisch the 2010s were a period of reminiscence and a return to his earliest years as a poet with an enthusiasm for the exoticism, absurdity, and playfulness of poetry. Miloslav Topinka (b. 1945) reminded us of his presence on the literary scene with a selection from his modest number of poetry collections, published under the title Probouzení (Awakening, 2015), to which he added the new cycle “Prosvítání” (Enlightenment), in which he continues his lyrical examination of the ties between human existence, nature, and the universe as well as in dialogue with literary traditions and modern science.

Ivan Wernisch. Photo: Barbora Sládečková (CC BY 3.0)

During a decade when the presidential office was occupied by Miloš Zeman, external political circumstances briefly highlighted those writers who had lost a great deal of credit in terms of poetry and morality during the Communist regime. The conferral of a state medal of merit on Karel Sýs (b. 1946) provoked a debate regarding his work (and the work of similar poets), which since 1989 has been dominated by verbal aggression, vulgarity, and a consistent negation of post-1989 developments in Czech culture and society (e.g. Apokalypsa podle Joba [The Apocalypse According to Job], 2013). Jiří Žáček (b. 1945) found himself at the centre of attention in 2017 for his gender-insensitive poetry for children “What are girls in the world for? / For making babies”. In addition to the reaction of the press, a response in poetry form also very quickly followed, the collection K čemu jste na světě (What Are You in the World For?, 2018) by Ondřej Macl (b. 1989), in which the young poet offers dozens of parodies of Žáček’s aforementioned motif.

Baby Boomers

From the generation of baby boomers (born 1946–1963) during this past decade, the work of Svatava Antošová (b. 1957) stands out in her collection Dvojakost (Duality, 2014) due to the openness, urgency, and expressiveness with which the poet portrayed homoerotic intimacy as well as the fundamental division of a person thrown into the vicissitudes of personal emotional dramas while struggling to form a distinct identity of their own. The collection Dvojakost is also an inter-media dialogue between verse and the photographs of Petr Kuranda, portraying female genitals carved into the bark of trees or depicted in different ways in public spaces.

The other poets of this generation have tended to build upon their already established poetics: Miroslav Huptych (b. 1952) enhanced his imaginative, playful, and dreamlike poetics with harrowing experiences gained from working at a crisis centre (Noční linka důvěry [Confidential Night Line], 2012); Vít Slíva (b. 1951) developed his contemplative lyricism focusing on the passing of time (this time with greater emphasis on the brevity of miniature texts, e.g. Návrší [Hillock], 2014); Lubor Kasal (b. 1958) added to his lyrical-epic compositions with the poem Dvanáct (Twelve, 2011), in which he paints another tragi-comic picture of contemporary civilisation – on this occasion on the intertextual basis of Alexandr Blok’s eponymous composition; Sylva Fischerová (b. 1963) also moved towards an epic style in her emotionally urgent yet philosophically and historically nuanced collections Mare (2013) and Sestra duše (Soul Sister, 2015); J. H. Krchovský (b. 1960) also remained true to his popular, stylistically virtuosic, neo-decadent poetics in his collection Já už chci domů (I Want to Go Home Now, 2015).

Sylva Fischerová. Photo: Karel Cudlín

The poetry of Michal Maršálek (b. 1949) was a particularly unusual and unique phenomenon. Practically no one had heard of him before, but in the 2010s, this poet made a very bold entry onto the contemporary scene, quickly gaining the respect of younger generations and naturally becoming part of their debates on poetry as well as their social lives. Maršálek’s poetry collections Černá bere (Black Wins, 2014), Pootevřeno (Half-Open, 2015), and several others which were published in the 2010s, quickly came to prominence due to their expressive minimalism as well as their depth of ideas. Maršálek’s poems are tight-lipped and quiet, focusing on minor incidents of everyday life. Often all they need are a few austere verses with one single observation. The poet almost ascetically removes the majority of conceivable means of expression, but at the same time, we do not sense a lack in meaning when reading his texts. With Maršálek’s entrance into the world of Czech poetry, we once again had the distinctive figure of a poet reflecting on profound philosophical and existential matters.

This generation also contains a strong group of poets who made their debuts after 1989 (Petr Motýl, Petr Halmay, Roman Szpuk, Ewald Murrer, etc.). In the 2010s, the most prominent were Jiří Dynka (b. 1959) and Petr Hruška. Dynka continued in his stubborn search for a language capable of expressing the subtle values of intimacy and the strangeness of life in a postmodern setting. His collections are filled with a boldness of colour, the enchantment with nature, but also with the grim reality of the city as a heavily commercialised space. In his collection, Naučná stezka Olšanské hřbitovy (An Educational Guide to Olšany Cemetery, 2010), he also adds references to politics and history. The metaliterary reflections are also more pronounced, focusing not only on the process of writing, but also on the social life of literature, as in his collection Kavárny (Cafés, 2015) in which he thematises several Prague hotspots of the literary and café scene.

The collections of Petr Hruška (b. 1964) delved deeper into the mini-dramas of family relationships with precise observations of specific situations, though this time with a stronger link to the more general cycle of human existence and fate, torn between desires, intentions, rational reasoning, and how they crumble and disappear over time. In Darmata (2012), Hruška’s figures are more clearly situated within the social world; they avoid banks, they dread loans, they cannot stand politicians’ faces. A new element in the poetics of this influential author is also the occasional use of conceptual approaches (which are developed further in the collection Nikde není řečeno [Nowhere Is It Said] from 2019) – that is, when he appropriates texts from spam emails and reveals the poetic nature of their deformed language.

Petr Hruška. Photo: Rafał Komorowski, Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Generation X

Signs of a willingness to experiment also manifested in the poetics of the representatives of Generation X (authors born between 1965–1985), some of whom made their debuts shortly after 1989. In his somewhat misleadingly titled collection Milostné básně (Love Poems, 2012), Petr Borkovec (b. 1970) revived the genre of natural lyricism, at times using ironic language games and experiments with archaic language referring back to nineteenth-century poetry. Borkovec’s collections from the 2010s are constructed as distinctly heterogenous texts in terms of form, language, and theme. Their common denominator is an immersion in the roots of lyricism, song, sentiment, even at the cost of ironic detachment considered de rigueur in a genre that seems to have exhausted its expressive means. This ‘experimental’ nature of Borkovec’s new work is best summed up in the subtitle of his collection Herbář k čemusi horšímu (A Herbarium for Something Worse), 2018 – “Responses and Centos and Exercises”.

Since entering the literary scene in the 1990s, Martin Stöhr (b. 1970) has also significantly transformed his style. From his Bohuslav Reynek-styled miniatures and his spiritual, rurally situated lyricism, Stöhr moved towards factual yet dreamlike, melancholic images of the city, which merge the perspectives of documentary and memory and are populated by figures whose names are often to be found in contemporary literature. In addition to fleeting thoughts about the passing of time and living in the strange present day, some of Stöhr’s key themes include reflecting upon poetry (particularly in the collection Užitá lyrika [Applied Lyricism] from 2020, where his reflections are lightened by humour and self-irony), writing poetry, as well as meeting other poets.

Other figures from the ‘poetry of the 1990s’ changed less dramatically in their poetics, though they maintained the high standard of their established style: Radek Fridrich (b. 1968) developed his expressive poetry sensitive to the complex fate of North Bohemia and Czech-German relations in his collection Krooa krooa (2011). After a nine-year hiatus, Jaromír Typlt (b. 1973) returned to current Czech poetry with the collection Za dlouho (Not For a Long Time, 2016), in which he continues to be captivated by ambiguity in language, in particular by the sound of language. After an even longer pause, Pavel Kolmačka (b. 1962) returned to the Czech poetry scene in the 2010s with his collection Moře (The Sea, 2010), in which he seamlessly continued his sober, objective lyricism from the end of the 1990s. He observes, at an almost metaphysical level, the microworld closest to him, including his family and the apparent banality of everyday life. He manages to maintain this soothing and rurally unhurried level of perception in his subsequent collections Wittgenstein bije žáka (Wittgenstein is Beating a Pupil, 2014) and Život lidí, zvířat, rostlin, včel (The Life of People, Animals, Plants, and Bees, 2018), which he, however, complements, or rather interrupts, with cacophonous recordings of the hustle and bustle of the modern world. Following her previous attempt at epic poetry, Božena Správcová (b. 1969) returned to a more concise poetic form in the collection Strašnice (2013). However, she persisted in her efforts to create a modern or postmodern poetic mythology, the plots and stories of which are played out in contemporary Prague, transformed, though, into an original, dreamlike, and grotesque time-space. As in his other books from the 2010s, Milan Děžinský (b. 1974) toned down his, until then, characteristic expressiveness in Tajný život (A Secret Life, 2012), instead aiming for a lyricism based on objective description and intensive self-reflection, but also containing abstract philosophical reflections.

This group of contemporary Czech poets (labelled here Generation X – to borrow the sociological term) also features several important authors who were unable to publish their first books during the hectic 1990s and became part of the literary scene in the first years of the new millennium – often not coming to prominence until the 2010s. This was certainly the case for Daniel Hradecký (b. 1973), who made his debut in 2004, but who only gained more widespread attention with his collection 64 (2013), where, with an extreme economy in expression and cold analytical precision, Hradecký examines the fundamental elements of human existence or, more precisely, his own poetic existence: time, carnality, love, the desire to outdo oneself, the network of interpersonal relationships, and, not least, the network of relations between literary texts. In his subsequent collections, Přibližování dřeva (Yarding Wood, 2019) and Jezero (The Lake, 2020) in particular, the poet delves to the core of these themes using the slightly rougher route of the epic-forming and expressive diction of an angry outsider.

Daniel Hradecký. Photo: Josef Chuchma

The poetry of the 2010s also featured distinctive poets who, until then, had presented themselves collectively as the group Fantasía (their first eponymous collection came out in 2008) and who began to gradually appear individually after 2010. In his debut work, Rozevírání (Unfolding, 2011), Adam Borzič (b. 1978) attempted to reinvent a traditional style of spiritual lyricism, but it was with his next collection Počasí v Evropě (The Weather in Europe, 2013) that he came to the attention of the literary public. Here he managed to combine subjective lyrical reflection and self-reflection with an almost documentary look at contemporary Europe and its economic and spiritual crisis in particular. What proved to be quite unique was the concept for the collection Západo-východní zrcadla (East-West Mirrors, 2018). Here Borzič leads a multicultural dialogue between figures of the European Renaissance and medieval Islamic mystics. In his first work, Oheň po slavnosti (A Fire After the Celebrations, 2011), Kamil Bouška (b. 1979) was still following the dominant descriptive trend in contemporary lyricism, but subsequently in Hemisféry (Hemispheres, 2015), he discovered his own darkly expressive voice. If the lyrical confessional ‘I’ is still here at the foundations of the poems, Bouška’s next collection of poetry in prose, Inventura (Inventory, 2018), has a much more complicated communicative basis: its intention is to be nothing less than an inventory of humankind, questioning how much of humanity remains in the contemporary individual – and this by way of an often very cruel negation, beyond which, however, the space for the growth of humanist values seems to open up anew. The third member of the group, Petr Řehák (b. 1978), also developed a very distinctive voice in his first collection Násobit ruce (To Multiply Hands, 2014). A free-spirited, fertile imagination dominates Petr Řehák’s distinctive style, which for this poet leads de facto to a way of thinking that allows him to avoid stereotypes and preconceptions. Here Řehák understands the poem not as an opportunity for confession, but more as a textual object, something irritating, which functions in an obscure manner. Something, however, which convinces us that it is working properly, according to a plan, and is directed towards its goal.

Kamil Bouška. Photo: Jana Plavec

Jonáš Hájek (b. 1984), in terms of his age and first publications (he first published on amateur literature websites), could almost be considered part of Generation Y. His collection Básně 3 (Poems 3, 2013) loosely places him alongside the poets from Fantasía with their partial objectification of lyricism and attempt to shift the focus away from the interior to what surrounds the speaker. Básně 3 is also connected to the work of the Fantasía poets mainly by striving for semantic complexity: the collection contains both personal and private confessions, as well as references to the poet’s life in the community; alongside contemporary verse we find poems with historical subjects, and alongside lyrical monologues are texts which veer towards dialogue and pointing to an untold story.

Not least, the 2010s was a period which saw the arrival of a number of distinctive creative voices on the literary scene. But before we turn to the millennial Generation Y, it is necessary to mention a few very distinctive (and relatively late-arriving) debutants from the previous generation. Ondřej Buddeus (b. 1984) left an unmistakable mark on contemporary poetry with verse which stood out from the contemporary generation (and beyond) thanks to a willingness to experiment and an inclination towards a conceptual approach in the creation of his texts. His collection 55 007 znaků včetně mezer (55,007 Characters Including Spaces, 2011) is a conceptual work of text/art which, already from the most basic material level, strives to do one thing – get the reader involved. For example, the reader is presented with the task of deciphering the unusual method of page numbering, or even prior to that with the task of choosing a specific copy of the book from a series of different colours which it was produced in. As has been mentioned, the text is a concept which attempts to communicate its basic features through its materiality – which undoubtedly includes rationality and an intellectual approach towards reality and texts. Buddeus’s next collection, Zóna (Zone, 2016), is almost the polar opposite of the previous collection: in place of a precisely functioning rational concept, the maximum space possible is given to randomness, deliberate miscommunication, and linguistic deformation. Here Buddeus understands the poem as a space where language can reveal its hidden strengths and by doing so, point out the blurred borders between rationality and randomness, between originality and copying, and between accuracy and error.

Although not directly conceptual in nature, Olga Stehlíková’s (b. 1977) first work, Týdny (Weeks, 2014), is undoubtedly based on a very carefully conceived composition. In her collection structured into sections named after the days of the week, Stehlíková innovatively grasped the mainstream genre of factual descriptive lyricism, but instead of the usual mere documentation of mundanity, she focuses on deconstructing the speech we use to conceptualise and label this everyday experience. The ironic distancing from the poetic statement, which already played an important role in Týdny, was intensified by the poet in her collection of metaliterary puns, Za lyrický subjekt (For a Lyrical Subject, 2018), which was presented as a mystification project under the pseudonym of Jaroslava Oválská, behind which was the poetic duo Olga Stehlíková and Milan Ohnisko.

With their exceptional first books, and especially their subsequent collections, two somewhat later debutants from the 2010s were also Jitka N. Srbová (b. 1976) and Wanda Heinrichová. From the fragile, stylistically pared-down intimate poems of her first two collections – Někdo se loudá po psím (Someone is Hanging Around like a Dog) 2011, and Světlo vprostřed těla (The Light in the Centre of the Body, 2013) – Srbová developed a distinctive poetic concept in Les (Forest, 2016), where the ‘forest’ also comes to embody, de facto, a character, a dynamic actor in the short poetic stories and lyrical situations, and thus prefigured the growing interest in environmental themes in poetry. A similar process of ‘depersonalisation’ and a focus on the objective reality of language can be found in the poetry of Wanda Heinrichová (b. 1968), who in her first collection Nalomenou (2011) still worked her way through a web of cultural references before finally returning to herself embodied in the lyrical ‘I’. In the collection Jehla sestupuje (The Needle Descends, 2018), there is mostly no such return; the subjectivity of the commentary dissolves in the incredibly colourful and disparate linguistic reality of the collection, where genres, styles, and even languages alternate – and everything is only gently held together by a delicate, yet also grotesque atmosphere, and finally only by a network of relationships which move out of the book into the world of literature and its creators.

Wanda Heinrichová. Photo: Jana Plavec

Generation Y

As has been mentioned, a generation appeared on the literary scene in the 2010s which is sometimes described as the ‘internet generation’ (because these young men and women grew up in a world already linked by this global network), though more often it is referred to as the millennial generation or Generation Y. In what way is this group of poets who were born between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s different from other generations? The qualities attributed to them by sociologists include a heightened sensitivity towards political matters as well as an inclination towards digital technology, liberalism, and tolerance, but also narcissism. It must be said that this characterisation of Generation Y is fairly accurate even when looking at the literary generation. In terms of the relationship between poetry and politics, it could not be more fitting. Millennials are no longer warriors who want to revive socially engaged poetry (as was the case with the previous generation, which made clear the political dimension of their poetry in heated debates at the end of the previous decade). Poets of this generation are not concerned about political themes in poetry – they are concerned about their own life as a whole, part of which also understandably includes politics.

The first poet to challenge the aesthetic and intellectual stereotypes of poetry from the 1990s (which were to determine the poetry discourse well after 2000) was Jan Těsnohlídek Jr. (b. 1987). His first work, Násilí bez předsudků (Violence without Prejudice, 2009), published at the end of the previous decade, was a small revelation, because Těsnohlídek did not hide his ambition to be a generational spokesperson. Indeed the opposite was true, as the poet went on to effectively work with this in both literary and marketing terms. In the first person plural he attempted to express the feelings and frustrations of those who, like him, had grown up in the stormy atmosphere of the 1990s, and for whom the rhetorical background of those childhood years was constituted by the optimistic rhetoric of freedom and prosperity, which, however, reality completely failed to resemble. One emblematic figure which appears in the first books by these young poets is that of the homeless person. The shock from the deprivation and humiliation which someone can fall into without unduly upsetting passers-by is something which has helped shape this generation. This experience of a generation frustrated and disgusted by what was supposed to edify them is also articulated by Roman Rops (b. 1985) in the collections A la thèse (2012) and Maskirovka (2018), though with considerably more exaggeration and irony than Těsnohlídek (indeed, Rops deliberately caricatures Těsnohlídek’s rhetorical and somewhat naïve style). In the collection Pod dlažbou (Beneath the Cobblestones, 2016) by Jan Škrob (b. 1988), this frustration takes on a dystopian dimension in images of a new totalitarianism, where the life of the individual is subjected to constant surveillance and the permanent threat of persecution. However, beneath the layer of absurdity and dystopia lies an obviously profound authentic experience and emotional shock from the encounter with destitution which strips away human dignity.

Jan Škrob. Photo: Petr Zewlakk Vrabec

For these poets, it is not only about the accumulation of negative images, documenting the inhumanity of a society operating on the principles of a neoliberal ideology. The poems all comprise extremely personal commentaries highlighting the fact that the subjectivity in the poetry of this generation is shaped to a considerable degree by the juxtaposition of personal sensitivity and social cynicism. As a result, there is pronounced defeatism, fatigue, and resignation to be found in the debut works by these millennial poets who refuse to be part of a system whose falseness and cruelty were apparent to them as early as childhood.

Generation Y is also labelled the internet generation as these millennials have been surrounded by digital media and its networks since childhood. However, the virtues of this interconnected world – at least according to these poets – cannot and will not be appreciated. The ethos of cooperation and communication connected with the internet and digital culture appears here as another lost cause. Although the digital revolution ushered in an unprecedented level of interaction, it did not provide a way to change the system. This tension between the seeming democratisation of social discourse, which is seductively offered by interactive media, and the power of capital, which is determined not to budge an inch from its fixed position (in fact the opposite), is presented in the collection Proluka (Vacant Space, 2016) by Jan Nemček (b. 1986).

The poets of the internet generation have also spread their criticism of the media to areas outside of digital culture. A regular target of their disapproval and ridicule is the old medium of television. It does not take much to ironically represent bombastic television competition shows – it being enough to move a description of them onto a page in a poetry collection, as Klement Václav Lakatoš (b. 1986) did in his book Kapitalistické básně (Capitalist Poems, 2012). The aim of his verse is not to criticise media culture; instead, it has much more widespread implications – an appeal for authenticity. A desire to tear down the false trappings and distorting filters through which we normally and unreflectively perceive reality and which distance us from it. At the same time, Lakatoš’s collection is the most concentrated, while in terms of language and composition it is the most conspicuous and perhaps even most imaginative example of a poet’s criticism of capitalism to emerge from the work of Generation Y. It is impossible to overlook here the inspiration taken from the playful and imaginative poetics of the historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde: readers of Kapitalistické básně become involved through a poem in the form of quiz questions, elsewhere through the challenge to find permutations to Václav Havel’s statement, “Truth and love will triumph over lies and hatred.”

The millennial poets are disturbed not only by the scenes of human deprivation they encounter on the streets, but by the global character of contemporary capitalism in general. They try to come to terms with the tension between a desire to escape, to go somewhere else, and the knowledge that it is impossible to run away, because the world has become a unified global village and there is nowhere to hide from the principles of the system. They look at the impact of global capitalism when they contrast images of attractive consumer goods with badly paid jobs and dreadful working conditions on the other side of the world. This form of ‘global consciousness’ is apparent in the collection Vše o lásce (All About Love, 2019) by Tomáš Čada (b. 1985), where, employing emotional urgency, the banal situations from the life of a young family are juxtaposed with violent scenes from distant military conflicts.

Towards the end of the decade, questions and issues relating to the approaching environmental and climate crisis began to be brought up as part of poetry’s global consciousness. This partially reinflamed old passions; for a time, it was not politically engaged but environmental poetry which became a subject of discussion and debate. Ecopoetry started to appear on the pages of journals and literary websites, and for a while the atmosphere crackled with manifestos and counter-manifestos. The stand-out figure in this context (though also for his purely literary talents) was Jonáš Zbořil (b. 1988) with his collection Nová divočina (The New Wilderness, 2020), the subtext of which embodies an anxiety regarding the imminent environmental crisis, while in the actual text this environmental appeal appears very subliminally in the form of whimsical, imaginative situations, where nature regains the areas which had been taken from it and abused by humankind.

Jonáš Zbořil. Photo: Barbora Linková, Český rozhlas

However, it would be quite misleading to reduce the poetry of millennials to its political aspect. As I have already indicated, its specific character lies in the rediscovered complexity of expressing in poetry form the world and people’s destinies. An advantage for this generation is their distance from major historical events, which thus allows them to combine the personal and the social, the temporal and the eternal, the erotic and the political, and a number of other seemingly incompatible dualities. Meanwhile, for many poets it is clear that the social element does not dominate at the expense of subjective, intimate elements. This applies, for example, to Marie Feryna (b. 1993), who first wrote under a male name with a male identity (Před setřením [Before Wiping], 2016). She marginally (not activistically) addresses the issue of transition in the collections Osa (Axis, 2018) and Black Screen (2020), though the main theme of her collections forms a reflexive and, in terms of imagery, darkly expressive, almost blasphemous lyricism embedded in the language of poetry and a sensitivity towards metaliterary issues. The proportion of English passages in her poems gradually increases, not only due to intertextuality, but more as a generational gesture towards her peers for whom the macaronic form of Czech-English communication is found in everyday speech. A similar style of lyrical spokesperson is found in the figure of Marek Torčík (b. 1993) and his collection Rhizomy (Rhizomes, 2016), where we also find the distinctive use of Czech-English multilingualism: a young intellectual speaks to us from the collection, switching between languages with ease (even within one sentence) and proudly announcing his cosmopolitan or post-nationalist view of the world. And I will conclude this incomplete overview of the Generation Y poets with a collection where multilingualism also plays an important role, the author of which is also of an intellectual bent, albeit in a completely different context. The poetry collection Miluji svou babičku víc než mladé dívky (I Love My Gran More than Girls, 2017) by Ondřej Macl (b. 1989) describes the poet’s relationship with his Slovak grandmother and thoroughly examines the archetype of this figure throughout the history of literature as well as in each person’s life. In terms of genre, it is an unusual mixture of intimate lyricism, memoir, essay, and intertextual literary game.

This article, in which I attempted to provide a rough outline of the characteristics of Czech poetry which appeared over the past decade, is also incomplete. For a more exhaustive overview of Czech poetry in the 2010s, I would recommend the series Nejlepší české básně (The Best Czech Poetry), which was brought out annually by the publishing house Host until 2019. There is still too little time that has passed since the period I have described to be talking about trends, currents, and directions. One thing, however, is certain – between 2010 and 2020, a substantial amount of good poetry was created in the Czech Republic which is well worth tracking down.

Completed in Žižkov in December 2020 with support from Pavel Janoušek’s Praemium Academiae.

Translated from the Czech by Graeme Dibble.

In recent months and years, comics for children and young adults have been experiencing one of their more buoyant and dynamic periods. At least in the Anglo-American cultural sphere, they have been receiving more and more attention from critics and readers alike; hardly a month goes by without a renowned publishing house announcing the creation of another dedicated imprint or division; and as far as sales are concerned, comic books for children and young adults – or, as modern parlance has it , the “YA” audience – have managed to see off competition from all other comic-book genres and categories: so, for example, when Guts, the latest semi-autobiographical graphic novel by Raina Telgemeier (whose books have been brought out in Czech by Paseka), was launched with a million-copy first print run in September 2019, it did not just become the best-selling comics of the week in question, but the best-selling book full stop. Comics for children and young adults have also ventured into areas they had previously steered clear of and have not shied away from difficult subject matter – as well as the more obvious issues connected with adolescence, they have increasingly tackled identity and otherness (construed in various ways) or having to cope with a family crisis, a serious illness or the death of a close relative. And on top of that, they have continued to serve up a hearty dose of cheerful pictorial entertainment – much of it still about funny animals, but frequently more complex and sophisticated than used to be the case.

These trends have been mirrored in the Czech market for children’s books and comics, and so in recent years there has been a significant increase in the number of translations published in this category (and with it the number of publishers incorporating this kind of work into their editorial plans). In the domestic sphere, this wave coming in from abroad has met and merged with local developments prompted by the situation in this country: around the year 2010, Czech comics creators also gradually began turning to the child or adolescent reader, who had not been well catered for between 2000 and 2009 (as discussed in part one). The revitalization of Czech comics for children and young adults that can be observed with delight in recent years thus has its roots both at home and abroad and is connected with the desire of a number of talented creators to create new and interesting content for the child reader as well as with broader changes in the domestic comics cultural sphere.

Comics within magazines for children and young adults

If it was true that, with a few exceptions, the comics content of magazines for children and young adults from the first decade of the 21st century did not offer anything particularly engaging and did not amount to more than purely disposable, utilitarian reading material, a clear qualitative and quantitative shift can be said to have taken place in the following decade. Although translated content continued (and still continues) to be treated in a casual, rather unsystematic way (for example, in the spring of 2019 My Little Pony trotted back into Mateřídouška), between 2010 and 2019 there was plenty of original comics output as well, much of it conceived in a functional and successful way. Traditional periodicals like Sluníčko (Little Sun) and Mateřídouška (Thyme) increasingly began to make use of regular cartoon characters as mascots, and the series Líza a Pupík (Lisa and Tum), written by Eva Bavorová and drawn by Tomáš Suder (which came out in Sluníčko), as well as the tales of a pair of meerkats produced by Libor Drobný, Suri & Kata (Meera and Katy, from the magazine Mateřídouška) went on to prove their enduring appeal with book extensions or compendiums. Their adventures have thus managed to transcend the time frame of the periodical and become a more stable part of the culture of children’s comics in the Czech Republic.

Suri & Kata (Meera and Katy)

In comparison to the beginning of the millennium, when the range of children’s magazines on offer basically stagnated, the period from 2010 to 2019 also saw relatively dynamic changes in this area, which has witnessed an unprecedented expansion in recent years. New magazines like Báječná školka, Nedělníček, Primáček, Puntík and Tečka often advertise comics content right on the front cover and delight in casting cartoon characters in a prominent role as a regular guide to the magazine: in Báječná školka (Fabulous Kindergarten) this has long been the job of the pixies Matýsek a Majdalenka (the scripts by Marie Kšajtová are transformed into comic strips by Antonín Šplíchal), while the pages of the magazine Puntík (Dot) have become home to a prehistoric duo with a rather uninspired name, Dino a Saura by Vendula Hegerová.

A completely new format for this type of children’s reading material is represented by magazines produced outside traditional bricks-and-mortar periodicals publishers as an alternative to mainstream production, which is often viewed by the creators of these magazines as being too commercial, overly slick and banal. Magazines like Hrana (Let’s Play, published from 2012 to 2015) or Raketa (Rocket, since 2014) are largely devoid of advertising, compose individual issues around a theme and build on more active involvement from the reader and more imaginative (and as far as artistic quality is concerned, more consistent and reliable) content. With Hrana, constructed around the tales of three children, Dorka, Prokop, Šíma, the lead comic strip (as well as other artistic content) was produced by Magdalena Bořkovcová, while Raketa features a number of comic strips, with recurring series including Nikkarin’s Dobrodružství Rockyho & Terky (The Adventures of Rocky and Terka), Doktor Racek (drawn by Lukáš Urbánek based on scripts by Milada Rezková) and Matylda a Růžovej vlk (Matilda and the Pink Wolf) by Petra Josefína Stibitzová and Jana Šrámková.

Raketa (Rocket)

The sector of magazines aimed at young adults has developed much more slowly, but even here comics have started to play a more important role again. A regular spot was traditionally set aside for cartoon strips in Scout magazines (drawn by artists such as Jiří Petráček, Miroslav Schönberg, Tomáš Chlud and Jan Smolík), and at least a few pages of comics content were incorporated into the monthly magazine Časostroj (Time Machine), founded in 2011, with the subtitle “a fun journey into history” (again with visuals by Smolík and Chlud). One deviation from established editorial policies was the inclusion of Dan Černý’s teen series Jelita (Puddings) in the magazine Bravo, which had traditionally tended to be free of comics. However, when it came to youth-oriented comic output published in magazines, the lion’s share was provided by a fixture of the Czech periodicals market, the fortnightly ABC – according to its subtitle, “a magazine for the 21st-century generation”.

ABC, whose editor-in-chief has been Zdeněk Ležák since 2010, set itself the goal of carrying on the legacy of the famous series of the 1970s and 80s and once again began to place greater emphasis on sequential comics content published in instalments. This declaration of allegiance to an illustrious comics past was affirmed most openly by new work scripted by Vlastislav Toman, who was editor-in-chief at ABC throughout Normalization and himself produced a number of legendary stories during that time. The question of whether fairly traditionally conceived cycles like Malý Bůh – čas Kruana (Little God – The Time of Kruan) or Příběhy psané střelným prachem (Stories Written in Gunpowder) can appeal to a wider readership than just those who remember the original prototypes with nostalgia is debatable; nevertheless, they provide clear evidence of the editorial ambition of affirming the continuity of the magazine’s comics content (which is also reflected in another “comeback”: the aeronautical comic strip Král vzduchu [King of the Air], which was drawn by Michal Kocián based on a script by another “stalwart of ABC during Normalization”, Václav Šorel). In addition, the old hand Vlastislav Toman constantly makes an effort to come up with new subject matter: in 2019, for example, the magazine published an attempt to resuscitate the otherwise moribund genre of “boys club comics” Parta z bílých domů (The White Towers Gang, artwork by Jiří Filípek).

Nevertheless, apart from these works harking back to the magazine’s glorious past, ABC also carried a large amount of new, original comics content in the decade in question. All kinds of variations on the genre of the adventure story were produced for the fortnightly publication, for example, by the writer Martin Šinkovský and the cartoonist T762 (the detective stories developing a wryly humorous cycle about two detectives Prokop & Buben, or a series about an ancient clash between the Celts and the Romans, Mlžný ostrov zbarvený do ruda [A Misty Island Tinged With Red]); Matyáš Namai drew the martial-arts-inspired story Mistr Šao-linu (Shaolin Master) based on a script by Eduard Štěpař; and Petr Macek (script) and Petr Kopl (artwork) attempted an original take on an urban and pop-culture legend (Pérák: Oko budoucnosti [Spring-heeled Man: the Eye of the Future]) as well as the most famous classic of the “sword and sorcery” fantasy genre in the series Conan a jeskyně života (Conan and the Cave of Life). Jiří Tesař has repeatedly featured in the magazine with self-penned comics (e.g. Tajuplný ostrůvek [The Mysterious Little Island]) as well as collaborations where he only took the role of script writer (e.g. the cycles created with the cartoonist Veronika Sýkorová Zapadlé království [The Forgotten Kingdom] and Co číhá pod vodou [What Lurks Beneath the Water]); and the aforementioned Zdeněk Ležák also made his debut as a scripter with the educational historical series Stopa legionáře (The Trail of a Legionary, artwork by Michal Kocián) on the pages of “his” magazine – more will be said of his other comics work below.

Čtyřlístek, its challenger, and attempts at an “American-style” comic book

In the decade in question, Čtyřlístek (Four-leaf Clover) remained the only homegrown magazine for children that was truly exclusively comics-based, but – as with ABC, described above – it can be said to have undergone a distinct revitalization (and rejuvenation) too. After Jan Endrýs became its editor-in-chief in 2011, the magazine expanded its circle of regular collaborators to take in creators from the younger generation (including several members of “Generation Zero”), who helped to restore some of the earlier originality and appeal to the otherwise slightly stagnating magazine. So, apart from the basically unchanging, time-and-trend-resistant title series about four animal friends from the small town of Třeskoprsky, which even in the fifth decade of its existence was still being drawn by Jaroslav Němeček, the magazine also began to carry work by other artists that was more modern in its conception and represented a refreshing variety of genres and artistic styles: Dan Černý (a warm and funny pastiche of superhero stories from the world of insects, Tryskošnek [Jetsnail]), Tomáš Chlud (the historical quests of two brothers and a robot Cyril a Mikuláš [Cyril and Nicholas]), Lucie Neisnerová (the emancipated female pirate captain Isabela, královna Karibiku [Isabella, Queen of the Caribbean]), Filip Škoda (the prehistoric scallywags Pazourek a Zoubek [Flint and Fang]), Petr Kopl (the serialized wizarding epic Morgavsa & Morgana) and Nikkarin (Hubert & Hugo, a comic strip inspired by the world of computer games and modern pop culture). Apart from the basic series of sixteen issues (or rather twenty, since four editions were brought out in a double-length format and are listed as double issues), the Čtyřlístek universe also developed spin-off magazines: between 2012 and 2019 the puzzle magazine Čtyřlístek Speciál was joined by a quarterly magazine targeted at girls, Ahoj, tady Fifi (Hi, Fifi Here), which, as well as the story of the eponymous Fifinka of Třeskoprsky, provided another publishing opportunity for Dan Černý (with the series Tritonky [Tritons]).

The “comics review for girls and boys” Bublifuk (Bubble Blower), which was dreamt up by Klára Smolíková and published by Triton from the end of 2015, could be ascribed the role of a kind of magazine contender/challenger which aimed to offer a fully comics-based alternative to the traditional Čtyřlístek. The strong authorial line-up consisting mainly of experienced creators from the younger generation (e.g. Kateřina Čupová, Lukáš Fibrich, Karel Jerie, Petr Kopl, Tomáš Kučerovský, Viktor Svoboda, Vojtěch Šeda, Martin Šinkovský, T762 and Petr Šrédl) offered readers an impressive array of new series; nevertheless, the magazine was beset with difficulties from the outset. Instead of an expensive magazine distribution network, it opted to sell direct to customers in bookshops, but many of them did not know how to display the small, slim booklets; the effort to ensure the greatest possible diversity turned out to be rather problematic (some artists found it very difficult to work within the limited number of pages provided to them); and even a quarterly rate of publication proved to be too low. A few years later, the first ambitious attempt at a new anthological children’s comic magazine came to an end after just eight issues in February 2018, and unfortunately most of the series that were underway have remained incomplete.

Bublifuk (Bubble Blower)

Greater longevity and popularity with readers was ultimately enjoyed by two projects which attempted to transpose the publishing model of the “American comic book” (i.e. a magazine of about 24–32 pages with dimensions of roughly 19 × 25 cm) to the Czech setting. As a local paraphrase of the signature superhero genre, the series (and magazine of the same name) Dechberoucí Zázrak (Breathtaking Marvel) by scripter Petr Macek and cartoonist Petr Kopl took on the difficult task of trying to provide original content that was not built on strong franchises underpinned by feature films or merchandising while competing with the translated superhero series that were being regularly published at the same time. Between 2015 and 2017, this monthly magazine published by the Czech News Center (which is also responsible for the daily tabloid Blesk [Flash]) totalled 25 issues, and even though it failed to avoid some fluctuation in the quality of the scripts and artwork, it still convincingly demonstrated both the ability of the creators to produce a regular monthly series and the willingness of the Czech comic-reading public to support a project of this kind.

One comic that stood apart from the usual Czech categories of genre and form was Jirka – komiks Jirky Krále (Jirka – Jirka Král’s Comic), which first came out in 2016. This magazine, which captures entertaining everyday episodes in the life of a successful Youtuber in drawings by Pavla Navrátilová, is virtually the only Czech contribution to the genre of the celebrity comic, which last made a significant appearance in this country in the early 1990s in the form of a translated series about the boy band New Kids on the Block. The child and adolescent readership of this magazine may well be recruited outside the circle of the usual comics readers, but because of its conspicuous and continuous presence on the market (by the end of 2019, the 43rd issue had been published and two book anthologies had also come out) it cannot be overlooked – and it is quite possible that for many young readers Jirka plays the role of a kind of “gateway” comic, as Čtyřlístek has done for decades, providing them with an entry point to other (thankfully, often more accomplished) sequential storytelling through pictures and words.

A flood of (often educational) books

In spite of the exceptions mentioned above, purely comics-based magazines – whether anthological or, following the American model, single-series – did not turn out to be a particularly productive and durable platform in the local conditions either (recently, even long-running translated series like Kačer Donald [Donald Duck] and Star Wars have come to an end). Since 2010 the role of the key publishing format that has been most successful in communicating with its readers and helping reprinted work to reach a wider audience has increasingly been taken on by comic anthologies and books. The wave of collected or selected reprints making high-quality 20th-century Czech comic strips available has continued or perhaps even intensified, and as was mentioned before, there has been a rapid increase in the number of translated titles too. Compared to the previous decade, it has become increasingly common for collected editions of comics to come out in parallel in specialized and non-specialized magazines. For example, of the aforementioned comics, the following cycles have been published in book form: Líza a Pupík, Suri & Kata, Matýsek a Majdalenka, Jelita, Mlžný ostrov zbarvený do ruda, Pérak: Oko budoucnosti, Tryskošnek, Morgavsa & Morgana and Doktor Racek, and other volumes are being prepared for publication.

In addition, there have also been lengthy comics for children and young adults originally published in book form, even though some of these books may have been based on a popular template in another medium. For example, there were numerous comics adaptations or extensions of children’s television cartoons: publications of this kind include Žížaláci (The Wormies) by Jaromír Gál (2011), O Kanafáskovi (Tales of Dimity) by Galina Miklínová (2012), Tarbíci a Marabu (The Gerbils and the Marabou) by Martina Komárková and Bára Dlouhá (2012) and Bílá paní na hlídání (The White Lady Nanny) by Petr Friedl and Pavel Brycz with visuals by an artist who signs himself Vhrsti (2013). Between 2015 and 2018 the cartoonist Martin Krejčí devoted not one but three albums to the rabbits Bob and Bobek, originally by Vladimír Jiránek. Further out on the margins of comics output are books in which stills from the original animations are arranged into comic-strip panels: in 2015 Večerníčkův pohádkový špalíček (Večerníček’s Treasury of Tales), published to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the titular television programme Večerníček (Bedtime Stories), offered several dozen such pseudo-comics stories.

However, most homegrown book-mediated comics for children and young adults belong to a different genre: the vast majority of Czech comics for this age category published on a standalone basis are not only attempting to engage and entertain their readers, but also to educate them. The plethora of educational comics for children and young adults published between 2010 and 2019 can be explained both by creators’ and publishers’ awareness of the high commercial potential of these books (based on the logic that “parents will buy it for their errant offspring”) and by the prevailing but problematic tendency of domestic cultural policy (and its grant programmes) to focus on “big national anniversaries”. Unfortunately, this logic all too often results in the quality of the artwork together with the skill and sophistication of the visuals and scripts taking a back seat to the effort to “bring out something in time to tie in with Charles IV (Jan Hus, 100 years of the Republic, the 30th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, etc.)”.

These kind of entertaining-and-instructive or unapologetically educational comics can be divided into several categories based on their formal techniques or chosen subject matter. By far the most numerous are works drawing on (mainly national) history and capturing its major milestones and key figures. Apart from Jiří Černý, whose recent books have embraced the legacy of Obrázky z českých dějin a pověstí (Pictures from Czech History and Legends) by Pavel Zátka, Jiří Černý and Jiří Kalousek (such as Obrázky z československých dějin [Pictures from Czechoslovak History], on which Jaroslav Veis collaborated as scripter and Barbara Šalamounová drew the artwork, 2011, or Obrázky z moderních československých dějin /1945–1989/ [Pictures from Modern Czechoslovak History /1945–1989/] with visuals by the cartoonist Lukáš Fibrich), the most productive originator of this kind of work in terms of quantity is the aforementioned Zdeněk Ležák. His popularizing retellings frequently combine comics segments with commentary in the form of illustrated prose and have involved collaborations with various artists: Michal Kocián, Petr Holub, Jakub Dušek, Jiří Zimčík, Jonáš Ledecký. Between 2014 and 2019 he managed to produce and publish a dozen of them through various publishing houses (apart from the two volumes of the aforementioned Stopa legionáře, there were the titles Ve jménu Husa – Zrození kalicha [In the Name of Hus – The Birth of the Chalice], Karel IV. – Pán světa [Charles IV – Master of the World], Tři králové [Three Kings], Kronika bolševismu [A Chronicle of Bolshevism], TGM [Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk], 100 let Československa v komiksu [100 Years of Czechoslovakia in Comics], Sametová revoluce [The Velvet Revolution], Stalin: Krutý vládce Ruska [Stalin: Russia’s Cruel Ruler], Kronika nacismu [A Chronicle of Nazism] and Jan Žižka – Boží bojovník ve jménu Husa [Jan Žižka – A Holy Warrior in the Name of Hus]). Unfortunately, the quality or sophistication of these projects seems to correspond to the quantity; nevertheless, “parental” support, which translates into commercial success, has ensured that this source of a petrified image of history is unlikely to dry up any time soon.

Zdeněk Ležák and Michal Kocián. Photo: klubknihomolu.cz

Fortunately, there are also other artists working in Czech comics for children and young adults who have turned their hand to national history: notably, in recent years the aforementioned well-established duo of Martin Šinkovský and T762 have come up with several interesting comics in which key moments in national history are generally seen through the eyes of ordinary people – in many cases, citizens residing outside the capital (such as 1918 Budoucnost ve vlastních rukách – 1968 Procitnutí do temnoty [1918 The Future in Our Own Hands – 1968 Awakening to Darkness], 2018, or Trikolora [Tricolour], 2019); back in 2012 a remarkable comic-book biography, Antonín Dvořák, was brought out by one of the most respected contemporary Czech illustrators, Renáta Fučíková; other compelling works include the “Hussite” books by Jan Smolík and Klára Smolíková, which came about through a collaboration with museums in Tábor, Husinec and Třebíč (Husité [Hussites], 2012, Jak se staví mesto [How to Build a City], 2014, and Husův dům [The House of Hus], 2015). With other projects – such as the series Češi (Czechs), based on television scripts by Pavel Kosatík – their age targeting is manifest, but they are still among the most interesting things to come out of Czech historical comics in recent years. Also to be commended are two book extensions of the television series Sám v muzeu (Alone in the Museum) in which stories of exhibits from Czech museums by Petra Braunová were given the Jan “Hza” Bažant treatment.

A separate niche of educational comics is made up of books about art: in many cases comics play only a subsidiary part in them; however, they are frequently more successful in combining their didactic and entertainment roles than their counterparts dealing with national history. Probably the most successful work of this kind, Proč obrazy nepotřebují názvy (Why Paintings Don’t Need Names) by Ondřej Horák and Jiří Franta (2014), manages to organically blend a detective story about a theft in a gallery with an everyday story of two siblings spending an afternoon in town with their grandparents and in the process, almost as an aside, explain a great deal about modern art.

Of course, comic books from other genres also crop up from time to time: adventure or science-fiction tales for young adults meet with attempts to take up the mantle of Jaroslav Foglar (whether in the form of a new trilogy by the scripter Josef Blažek and the cartoonist Jiří Filípek from 2017/2018, or an anthological volume of tributes to Rychlé šípy a jejich úžasná nová dobrodružství [The Fast Arrows and Their Wonderful New Adventures] edited by Tomáš Prokůpek in 2018), and there have been efforts to attract very young readers to comics with playful adventures about all kinds of cartoon animals. One unique artist who stands apart from these traditional genre categories but right at the epicentre of readers’ interest is Pavel Čech, who between 2010 and 2019 divided his talents among comics, picture books and fine art. Two of his titles clearly aimed at child or adolescent readers which deserve a mention are a humorous and playful series featuring a Red Indian, Dobrodružství Rychlé Veverky (The Adventures of Fast Squirrel, since 2013, five albums so far), and especially the magnum opus Velké dobrodružství Pepíka Střechy (The Great Adventure of Pepík Střecha, 2012). This 200-page comic book about the trials and tribulations of adolescence and the importance of taking one’s life into one’s own hands represented a major milestone – not only for the Čech’s work, but also for Czech comics for children and young adults in general: it was the very first work of this kind to be awarded a Magnesia Litera prize.

Pavel Čech

Bright prospects

The Magnesia Litera for Pepík Střecha can be correlated with other events and systemic changes which in the period under observation signalled a partial re-evaluation of the approach and attitude of the Czech cultural scene and its institutions to the comic in general, and to its offshoot for children and young adults in particular. Comics for very young readers have been newly designated a separate category in the Golden Ribbon awards conferred by the Czech branch of IBBY, and after years of being overlooked they have also started to achieve recognition from the sector’s Muriel awards. Within the context of Ministry of Culture grant programmes, it is now possible to apply for funding for publishing comic books through a separate grant commission; it is becoming increasingly common for museums and galleries to make use of children’s comics within various exhibition projects; and comic-book titles are regularly showing up in the authoritative selection of Nejlepší knihy dětem (The Best Books for Children). Given the diversity of artists and subject matter, the range of genres and the growing interest from readers, the media and critics, there is every reason to believe that Czech comics for children and young adults will continue to flourish in the decade to come.

Dozens of excellent Czech books were published in 2016, which undoubtedly deserve to be translated and read in many languages. This feature presents the most important literary fiction of the year — eight books which have been widely read in the Czech Republic, received critical acclaim and have the potential to appeal to international readers.

Contents

Bianca Bellová: The Lake

Jiří Hájíček: The Rainstick

Petr Stančík: An Angel’s Egg

Zuzana Brabcová: Aviaries

Zuzana Kultánová: Augustin Zimmermann

Marek Toman: The Praise of Opportunism

Marek Šindelka: Material Fatigue

Emil Hakl: Uma’s Version

Bianca Bellová

The Lake
Jezero

(Host, 192 pages)

This novel deservedly received widespread attention from readers and almost universal critical acclaim, which led to nominations for the EU Prize for Literature and the Magnesia Litera Award. Bellová has written a dystopian page-turner combining literary fiction with genre elements. Set near a lake that is drying up and ominously pushing out its banks, this novel is an archetypal story of the coming of age of a young boy who fights his way out of a tough environment as he searches for his roots in the contaminated soil of his devastated lakeland home. For its hero, who embarks on his journey with nothing but a bundle of nerves and a coat that was once his grandad’s, it is a pilgrimage. To get to the greatest mystery, he must sail across and walk around the lake and finally sink to its bottom. Polish, Arabic, Bulgarian and Macedonian translations are in preparation and an excerpt from the text has been selected for the 2017 Susanna Roth Award for beginner translators of Czech.

Praise

“You will read Bianca Bellová’s raw, ruthless, apocalyptic prose with astonishment. It’s a stubborn and prickly book, which resists the reader until the last sentence, yet you won’t be able to put it down. Such a confidently and authentically written work with a clear intention, precise and seamless, deserves awards.”

— Kateřina Kadlecová, Reflex

“Bianca Bellová has enriched Czech literature with a harsh dystopia, one of the most remarkable books of recent years.”

— Alena Slezáková, MF Dnes

Links

Foreign rights: www.pluh.org
Publisher: nakladatelstvi.hostbrno.cz

Excerpt ▼

I. Embryo

Nami, bathed in sweat, holds his grandma’s blubbery hand. The waves from the lake slap against the concrete jetty. He hears the sound of screams, shrieks, coming from the town beach. It must be a Sunday if he’s here on the blanket with his grandma and grandpa. There’s one other person here too. He recalls the three dark spots of a swimsuit, three triangles of a bikini, with a long dark tail of hair hanging down, brushed out like the tail of a horse, and two dark tufts of hair visible in the underarms. The three triangles move slowly in the sun, turning over again and again, until there is only one. A little ways offshore, a catfish lazily flicks its tail.

“The surface seems lower than it used to be,” Nami’s grandma says, smacking a fly as it lands on her belly. She chews roasted sunflower seeds, bought from the stand on the beach, spitting the shells onto the concrete in front of her.

“What’re you talking about?” Nami’s grandpa says with a laugh. “Women’s wisdom—second worst thing in the world, next to a hangover!”

Nami’s grandpa rocks back as he laughs, hands on his thighs. Wedged between the fingers of one of his dirty, chewed-up hands is an unfiltered cigarette.
The three triangles pick up a thermos, turn to Nami, and pour him a cup of mint tea.

“Have a drink, love.” Well, what do you know? The three triangles have a voice. It’s pleasantly deep, like the old well behind their house. Nami takes a drink. The tea, sweetened with honey, is delicious. It slides down his throat with no resistance.

“Let’s go then, love,” his grandpa says in a placating voice. “Wouldn’t want anyone calling you a sissy. Every boy of three in these parts needs to know how to swim.”

He runs a hand over his rounded belly. Flicks the cigarette butt into the water, where it lands with a hiss. Nami doesn’t want to go in the water. He wants to lie on the blanket, resting his head on his grandma’s soft belly and watching the three red triangles. He attempts to lift a hand, but it just drops lazily back in his lap.

“Go on, Nami,” his grandma says. “I’ll buy you a lollipop.”

The lollipops always have cellophane stuck to them. You can never get it off. The only time Nami ever gets one is World Peace Day or when the three triangles come to visit. They taste of burnt sugar and violets. He doesn’t really like the taste, but to get one is so rare that he looks forward to it every time and does whatever he’s asked to do.

Nami slowly gets to his feet, but before he can fully stand he finds himself flying through the air.

“Now swim, sturgeon!” his grandpa shouts, bursting into laughter. The three triangles scream. So does Nami’s grandma. Landing painfully on his side, Nami breaks through the surface and sinks down through the dark water. Looking up, he can see the faint shine of the sun in the swarm of bubbles trailing behind him. His lungs ache, he’s had the wind knocked out of him. The deeper he sinks, the colder the water gets. Nami sinks numbly, arms outstretched, flapping at his side. Any second now, he thinks, he’s going to see the Spirit of the Lake, which lives at the bottom. The pressure on his lungs grows, his ears feel like they’re about to explode. Instinctively he gasps for breath and swallows a mouthful of water. He can’t see anymore. He waves his arms and legs wildly, struggling toward the surface. Everything is black and shiny.

“Stupid old fool,” his grandma says as Nami finally catches his breath and starts furiously coughing up dirty water. “You old ass, I wouldn’t trust you with a can of worms!”

“What’s wrong? He’s fine, isn’t he? You saw the boy swim, right?” Nami’s grandpa says in a defensive tone. His voice is trembling slightly. “A true warrior!”

“Come here, love,” the three triangles say from the depths of the earth, wrapping Nami into their arms. One pounding chest on another. Nami settles down and stops coughing. The skin beneath the triangles is warm and bronze and smells wonderful. The three triangles hold him close, kissing his hair and speaking in whispers. The woman’s hair tickles his face, and she begins to sing.

“Don’t sing to him!” the old lady shouts. Nami shudders, but then lies still again. He doesn’t move a muscle, pretending he’s dead, that he doesn’t even exist. The singing falls away to nothing but a thick sound with each exhale, like the vibrations of a bell dying down after the clapper has stopped. Nami wishes he could stay that way forever. He steals a glance at the woman’s face, but all he can see is the tip of her nose and her prominent cheekbones.When they walk home, Nami faints and his grandpa has to carry him.

Instead of going across the square with the statue of the Statesman and the ditch the Russians bulldozed for trash, they take the back way, around the apartment complex.
“You’re quite a load, boy,” grumbles Nami’s grandpa. His foot slips and he freezes, barely catching his balance in time to avoid a fall. They reach home and Nami gets his lollipop. He licks it more out of obligation than enjoyment. Out the corner of his eye he watches the three triangles, which meanwhile have changed into a blue-and-green flowerprint dress. He touches it when he has the chance, and is rewarded with a wonderful smell.
That evening Nami has a violent vomiting fit. His stomach contracts uncontrollably, ejecting torrents of dirty water, mint tea, and lumps of sheep cheese blini. The blue-and-green flowerprint dress strokes his forehead, holding his head while he vomits, wiping his mouth and whispering in a soothing voice. “Shh, love, everything’s going to be all right.”
The next morning, when Nami wakes up, the blue-and-green dress is gone. He takes a sip of black Russian tea and vomits it right back up.

***

Nami grew up surrounded by the smell of fish, so he never really noticed it. The small town of Boros has a sturgeon hatchery and, right next door, a fish processing plant. Alea, their neighbor, works in the fish factory. Sometimes she comes over to sit on their doorstep, and brings a bucket of caviar to trade for a sack of potatoes. Then Nami has to eat caviar every day for breakfast and dinner, sitting over the bucket, scooping it up by the spoonful, until he’s sick to his stomach.

“You ate it all?” his grandma asks. Nami lowers his eyes and stares at the floor.

“That’s all right,” his grandma says. “Caviar is the healthiest thing in the world. Next to ginseng!”
“And next to a good fuck,” the old man says with a grin from the corner of the room. He rubs the corner of his eye with his thumb, gripping an unfiltered cigarette between his index finger and his misshapen middle finger.

“Grandpa, you should be ashamed!” Nami’s grandma chides him, but she too is grinning. She fries a batch of blini and slathers them with butter. “You eat like a VIP,” she says, smiling at Nami as she fills his plate. Nami likes caviar, but he feels like that can’t be all there is. He hopes that something more meaningful lies in store, but at four years old he doesn’t have the words yet to express it. He crushes the little black beads between his teeth, absently picking at the scab on his knee.

His grandma has a big lump on her tailbone, broad bony hips, and a soft tummy that Nami likes to fall asleep on. She strokes his hair with a hard, dry hand as she tells him stories about the Spirit of the Lake and the warriors of the Golden Horde, who sleep in the Kolos cliff, waiting until the great warrior comes to wake them up.

“Will that be me?” Nami asks.

“Yes, it will, my boy,” his grandma smiles.

“But how will I find them?”

“Providence will show you the way, love.”

Nami hears his grandma’s words and peacefully drifts off to sleep.

***

It’s Fishery Day, the biggest holiday of the year. The whole town is gathered on the square around the statue of the Statesman. The children are dressed in snow-white shirts, the boys with colorful neckties, the girls with ribbons in their hair. Akel the vendor, who normally sells herring and sunflower seeds from his stall, also has cotton candy and luscious doughnuts, soaked in burned fat. Today is the day when none of the fishermen go out on the lake, because they’re all celebrating. By eleven a.m., almost nobody’s left standing on their feet; they have sacrificed too mightily to the Spirit of the Lake.

The chairman of the fish processing plant delivers a long speech, singing the praises of progress and collectivization as he shifts his gaze from the lake to the sky and back again. A man with a shaman’s headdress on—though nobody mentions him, as if he weren’t really there—dances around the statue of the Statesman. The Russian engineers and their wives, standing in the first line of listeners, are dressed in big-city fashion; the women in high heels, leather purses over their arms, hair brushed high. The local women speak of them with contempt; sometimes they even spit. One of the small Russian boys, despite the dumb look on his face, is an object of admiration, riding back and forth across the square in a squeaky pedal car. Nami can’t take his eyes off of him. He grips his grandma’s sweaty hand, crossing his legs; he badly needs to go pee. In one hand he holds a parade waver shaped like a fish. His grandpa stands next to him on the other side, swaying unsteadily, head drooping; every now and then he loudly smacks his lips. They hear the sound of thunder, or maybe gunfire from the Russian barracks. The Russian engineers and their wives look at one another in disgust and shake their heads. Nobody has been listening to the speech for a while now. The women converse in a lowered voice, but nobody leaves, out of courtesy. They all have their minds on the banquet that awaits them in the fish processing plant: blini with caviar, herring in mayonnaise, onion tarts, blackberry wine for the women, and plenty of hard liquor for their men. Nami can’t stop watching the green pedal car, cruising over the bumps and potholes like a tank. He tries to look away but can’t. Even when he shuts his eyes he still sees the car. His insides ache, squirming with envy.
“Can we go now, Grandma?”

“Soon, just hold on.”

“How much longer?”

“Just a little while.”

For a five-year-old boy, a little while is practically an eternity.

“Grandma?”

“What is it now?”

Nami says nothing.

“You peed yourself.”

Nami’s grandpa wakes from his snooze and looks around uncertainly.

“The boy peed himself,” Nami’s grandma whispers, elbowing the old man.

“Idiot,” he rasps.

A stain slowly spreads across the front of Nami’s shorts as a stream of urine runs down his thighs. The thunder rumbles again, and this time there’s lightning too. Wind whips the last few pages of the speech the factory chairman still has left in front of him, and without further warning the sky rips open, water gushing like when Nami’s grandma empties out the washtub. As the women’s hair collapses, blue makeup streams down their faces in hydrologic maps, and their high heels slip in the mud that has suddenly formed on the square, but the chairman of the fish factory won’t stop speaking. The statue of the Statesman silently raises its arms to the sky. In an instant, Nami is soaked to the skin. All that’s left of his parade wand is a wooden rod and streaks of red paint on his arm. The square has turned into a ploughed field, people sunk in mud up to their ankles and losing their shoes. The boy in the pedal car gets stuck in the mud and starts crying. Nami’s grandpa tips his head back and lets the rain fall on his face. The square lies on a slight slope, so it doesn’t take the boys long to realize the mud is great for sliding in. Akel desperately tries to keep his stand from slipping away downhill. Doughnuts tumble off the counter, dropping in the mud.

“It’s the Apocalypse,” Nami’s grandpa mumbles, beginning to sober up.

Water continues to pour from the sky, gradually filling the boy’s pedal car. The microphone gives out entirely, but the chairman goes on speaking. It’s like a silent comedy, except for the roar of the rain and the thunder, which every now and then strikes so nearby that Nami’s grandma twitches and looks toward the lake with terror on her face. The shaman slowly walks away, gripping his headdress. Then, following his lead, the masses of people hypnotically stir into motion. The factory chairman lowers his arm holding the microphone. Water runs down the collar of his jacket, down his shirt. He gazes accusingly at the sky. Nami can’t help himself, overcome by uncontrollable laughter, giggling like a madman. His grandma rolls her eyes at him, but Nami just laughs even more, still laughing hysterically as his grandma drags him home by the hand.

Nami doesn’t stop laughing until they cross the threshold of his house. His grandma slaps him across his sopping-wet thighs and his laughter finally stops, but he still hiccups long into the night.

They caught a lot of fish that year.

***

Sometimes Nami wakes up in the morning in bed and the sun is shining into his eyes. It must be vacation, since otherwise his grandma would have woken him up. It’s probably warmer outside than indoors. From the kitchen Nami can hear his grandpa’s smoker’s cough and the horn of a tugboat in the distance. He throws his arms and legs wide on the bed and stares up at the ceiling, where bunches of thyme and lady’s-mantle are drying. He feels like he could spend the rest of his life like this. If he sits up in bed, he can see all the way to the lake. He stretches out and puts on his clothes. On the kitchen table he finds a plateful of doughnuts waiting, fried for breakfast by his grandma. They’re only lukewarm now. He runs outside, determined to build a hideout in the branches that will hold up—not like last time, when it all fell apart and he got a scrape on his back.

The only tree for miles around is a cherry tree with a reddish-brown trunk that got struck by lightning, now half its branches are withered. Nami drags over a few large boards of various length and thickness. They slip and start to fall, he has to tie them together with rope. He tries to nail them in place with his grandpa’s carpenter’s hammer, which weighs at least ten pounds. The tree groans, the branches shake, and the boards resist, sliding away. The nail runs right through the board into empty space.

“For fuck’s sake!” Nami screams, throwing the hammer to the ground.

“What are you doing up there, boy?” Nami’s grandpa bellows, stepping out of the outhouse. “Lucky for you you don’t have a father, you miserable brat, or he’d tan your hide!”

Nami stops and thinks a minute, wondering what it would be like to have his hide tanned by a father. He actually likes the idea.

“Our only tree and he goes and wrecks it. As if he hasn’t done enough damage already,” Nami’s grandpa hollers in the direction of his grandma. She stands with one hand propped on her hip, the other one shading her eyes as she searches for Nami.

Nami sits on the ground now, behind the toolshed, breaking rocks. He lifts the heavy hammer high over his head, then brings it down, closing his eyes. He repeats the motion again and again, till streams of sweat run off of him and the stone turns to dust. He finds it satisfying. He stares in amazement at the palms of his hands, which have broken out in huge blisters. He tosses the hammer into the grass and runs down to the lake to wash off the dust.

“C’mere, you little runt! I’ll hammer you like a nail!” his grandpa shouts after him. Nami keeps running. He knows his grandpa will never catch him.

***

“I don’t know, but it seems weird to me, having the fish processing plant right next to the hatchery,” Nami’s neighbor Alea muses. “I know fish’ve got little brains, but still. It’s like putting a graveyard next to the hospital where babies are born, don’t you think?”

“Pour us some more Chardonnay, boy,” says Nami’s grandma, sitting at the table. Nami tops up their shotglasses with potato spirits. His grandma runs a hand over the plastic tablecloth, breathes a sigh, and stares off into the distance.

“Not many of ’em either and they’re dying like flies,” Alea goes on.

“What?” Nami’s grandma replies absently. Today she and Alea are rolling dough for bureks, one sheet after the next, coating it with a layer of butter, then laying another layer on top. Instead of a rolling pin, they use a three-foot-long wooden bar, like the one they have in the school gymnasium. Nami’s grandma huffs and puffs, setting her hands behind her hips and stretching her back.
“The sturgeons,” Alea says, visibly annoyed.
The house is painted blue, with a white roof. The door is made of hard black locust. The roof has a hole in it. When the weather’s nice, it lets in sunbeams; when it’s raining, water. Little snakes live underneath the old floorboards, but they’re harmless, vanishing into the cracks at the first sound of footsteps. Nami’s grandma says they keep good luck in the house, and pours milk into a dish for them.

The house sits on a little hill overlooking the lake. From the front door you can see the boats sailing back into harbor. It’s just one step up to the stoop with the railing. Nami’s grandma likes to sit there and watch the men returning home. Elbows propped against the table, she knits, embroiders, slices vegetables for dinner, peels potatoes, pits cherries with a hairpin, receives visitors.

“I don’t like the looks of it,” she says wearily. Heavy clouds are gathering on the horizon, where the lake comes to an end. That usually means a storm is on the way.

“Don’t be so gloomy!” Alea says. “More Chardonnay, Nami. We get those clouds from the east here every April.”

The old lady sighs, sprinkling lumps of sheep cheese onto the layer of dough. “Look, the Spirit is frowning. He’s still angry.”

“Be quiet.”

“That wasn’t enough.”

“Shush!”

“He still wants more!”

The sky above the lake looks heavy as lead. The ponderous clouds cover over the horizon like a fat old man atop his wife on their wedding night. Nami is collecting snails from the garden and stacking them in a pile. He calls it snail school, pairing them in schoolbenches, frowning as he scolds them for giving the wrong answer. Sometimes he even uses a cane.

“I’m worried, Alea,” Nami’s grandma says softly, hanging her hands at her side.

“Me too, you old goose,” Alea says, giving her a hug. The two women fall together to form a sculpture, pressing close as hard as they can, trembling—how many times have they done this before? Someday, someone will make a statue of the fisherman’s wife, shading her eyes as she gazes out to the horizon; whole throngs of women, their right arms taut with muscle from constantly gazing out to sea.
“Go run and fetch the shaman, Nami!” his grandma calls to him.
“Don’t go anywhere, Nami. Your grandma’s drunk,” Alea corrects her. Nami rubs his hands on his thighs, awaiting further orders.

“They’ll come back. They always do, you silly thing. Don’t get hysterical,” Alea says, giving Nami’s grandma an awkward pat on the arm.

As she pulls the burek out of the oven, the first drops begin to fall. They chew the buttery dough, peering out the window through the torrents of water streaming down. Neither woman says a word.
Nami lies on the ground in his room, up on the second floor, drawing in his notebook with his grandpa’s purple ink pen. The rain pounds against the windowpanes, the wind slaps the loose sheet tied to the shed. He’s got the transistor radio on, tuned in to the same program he listens to every night. A soothing female voice recites the 24-hour forecast for sailors and fishermen. In a rich, full alto, she announces the wind speed and expected rainfall and cloud conditions for each individual part of the lake. She describes gale-force winds of 10 on the Beaufort scale with the same steady voice as she does a breeze rustling the leaves in the trees. Nami finds it calming. He lays his head down on the floor and falls asleep. When he wakes up in the morning, the sky looks swept clean and the sun is blazing hot. His body feels like it’s broken and he’s starving. He goes downstairs to get breakfast. He looks at his hands and discovers they’re covered in purple ink. There’s a candle burning on the kitchen table, and his grandma sits in the corner, leaning her back against the wall, staring wide-eyed straight ahead.
Nami’s grandpa, Alea’s husband, and six other fishermen are missing.

(Translated by Alex Zucker)

Jiří Hájíček

The Rainstick
Dešťová hůl

(Host, 280 pages)

Hájíček is a well-established author whose bestselling novels, with their deceptively simple and traditional narrative style, are regularly nominated for all the major Czech literary awards. He is a two-time Magnesia Litera Award winner and his books have been translated into a number of languages including English, Italian and Polish. In The Rainstick, Zbyněk, a land administrator, meets a former love he hasn’t seen for many years, in order to help her with an apparently simple property-related problem. Having returned to the country village in which he was born and grew up, Zbyněk is gradually apprised of the unclear circumstances of a land dispute; at the same time he becomes embroiled in personal and marital crisis. He struggles with insomnia, loses his way in the countryside and cadastral maps, while a crazy 18th-century rustic aviator hovers above him like an apparition. A turning point is reached when Zbyněk goes into battle with his face covered in war paint. The Rainstick has already won the prestigious Lidové noviny Book of the Year Award and has been nominated for the Czech Book Award.

Praise

“The Rainstick is one of the most powerful prose works of the year”

— Radim Kopáč, MF Dnes

“The conclusion of The Rainstick will reverberate in the reader for a long time. Hájíček is an exceptional storyteller”

— Ivan Hartman, Hospodářské noviny

Links

Author website: www.hajicek.info
Foreign rights: www.dbagency.cz
Publisher: nakladatelstvi.hostbrno.cz

Petr Stančík

An Angel’s Egg
Andělí vejce

(Druhé město, 200 pages)

Stančík, author of the Magnesia Litera Award-winning Mummy Mill, has written another playful and linguistically rich novel for lovers of imaginative historical fiction. History books give 8 May 1945 as the date when World War II officially ended in Europe. Few people know that in the Czech Republic, it lasted a few days longer. The author has chosen this lesser known historical event as the backdrop to his latest novel, which blends two story lines. In the first one, we follow the story of the book’s protagonist, Augustin Hnát: his birth and youth in the countryside; meeting his first love; the battles of the First World War, which take him to the farthest reaches of Siberia; and finally, the 12th of May, 1945. The second story line describes the fateful last day, as experienced by the Hnát, from dawn till dusk. Both story lines merge in a dramatic finale where humour turns to tragedy. An Angel’s Egg deserves as much international attention as the critically acclaimed Mummy Mill, which has been published in Spanish, Polish and Hungarian.

Praise

“Inspired by Kafka, Petr Stančík dishes out a combination of carefully researched historical curiosities, poetic images and lies.”

— Michal Šanda, Právo

“Despite all the humour, hyperbole, literary gluttony and wacky situations, An Angel’s Egg leads to such a powerful and tragic wartime finale that it will make your skin crawl.”

— Ivan Hartman, Hospodářské noviny

Links

Foreign rights: www.praglit.de
Publisher: druhemesto.cz

Excerpt ▼

21st February 1898

It was just after Christmas when Augustin fell in love with his classmate, Lenka Číšecká. The only problem was that he didn’t understand his feelings and being in love made him feel ill. So he blamed all of this on Lenka, which is why he also tormented her – he’d put a hairy caterpillar in her sandwich, stick blobs of wax in her long hair, which was the shape and colour of sun-drenched flax tow, or deliberately give away the ending to a fairy tale while she was in the middle of reading it.

Lenka endured all of this with patience beyond her years because she loved Augustin too and believed that one day he’d learn to master his feelings.

Their teacher, Mr Nebejas, was aware of all this, and even though he liked Augustin as much as all his other pupils, or perhaps even a little more, he would often punish him for bothering Lenka, but always in tandem with another offender. This was because Nebejas never beat the children with a cane or a ruler. If someone behaved badly, then they would face a feared method he called “the water of life”: the offenders stood opposite each other, stretched out their arms, palms down, and the teacher placed a cup of water on their hands. You could stop whenever you wanted, but the boys began to compete against each other and wouldn’t give in. The first one who did was labelled a coward. And so they would stand there for long minutes, eyes fixed on the trembling cups, teeth clenched in pain, and sweat dripping from their foreheads into their eyes which they couldn’t even wipe away.

The genius of the water of life lay in the fact that the miscreants punished themselves and no traces of this torture were left on their bodies. The only disadvantage was that there had to be at least two of them.

Augustin could hold the cup longer than anyone else and over time had begun to develop a nice set of biceps.

The teacher felt even more sympathy for Lenka because he himself was very lonely. His only knowledge of female anatomy came from a fold-out atlas of the human body, and his one love was history. He felt embarrassed in the presence of women, and a simple calculation told him that he couldn’t support a family on his derisory teacher’s salary.

But when it came to history he was transformed from a shy virgin into a fearless warrior. For example, when he learned from the old chronicles that the neighbouring village of Kosmo had not been named after the universe, but after the fact that the local peasants built their homes askew, or “kose” in Czech, he wrote an article about it for the journal of the Museum of the Czech Kingdom. He was then lured to the pub in Kosmo on the pretext of giving a lecture, where the locals gave him a right royal hiding.

No sooner had the swelling on his face gone down than the incorrigible amateur researcher found a medieval parchment in the archives in which the lord of the manor, Lord Smil, granted the villagers permission to dig a well. The razor-sharp Nebejas realized that the name of the village should properly be written as Smilavoda, as in Smil’s Water, and not Smylavoda, as in Cleansing Water, as everyone had thought until then.

He even sat down at his desk and wrote a letter to the district governor’s office governorship suggesting that in the interests of historical accuracy the village should be renamed. However, no reply was forthcoming and everyone continued to misspell Smylavoda with a y. But the teacher did not give up. His research ground to a halt, he stopped shaving, his garden behind the school became overgrown with weeds and he began to spend all of his money on envelopes, ink and stamps. He sent request after request to every office imaginable, including the ministries of cultivation, railways and war, the police headquarters, the Jewish community, Emperor Franz Joseph I in Vienna and Pope Leo XIII in Rome, the university, the academy of sciences, the householders’ cooperative, the grand master of the Seven Retorts lodge of the Illuminati, and so on, but no-one paid him the slightest attention.

Nor did Peprník the mayor want to hear about any changes. The town hall would then have had to buy a new sign with the name of the village on it. And so he ordered the town crier to announce that the village had got its name from a legend about a robber knight who had been driven by unrequited love to abandon the Templar order seven hundred years earlier and had stopped at the local well to wash off the blood of his victims, hence the name Smylavoda or Cleansing Water.

When Nebejas heard this, he ran straight to the town hall.

“Mr Mayor, admit that you made that story up!” he accused him in a faltering voice.

“I made it up,” admitted the mayor without blushing, tucking his thumbs into the edge of his fancy gold brocade waistcoat with its pattern of scaly, long-eared demons from the Ace of Acorns card. Amongst other things, the mayor was a passionate devotee of the card game mariáš with its tarot-style cards.

“But in that case it isn’t a legend!” said the teacher raising his voice.

“What do you mean? Of course it is!” the mayor contradicted him. “A legend is a legend precisely because of the fact that it isn’t a fact. Logically, then, every legend must have been made up by someone. So why not me? Now be off with you, teacher. I’ve work to do here.”

The schoolmaster couldn’t think of a suitable retort, so he left, humiliated.

In despair, he gradually began to breakfast, lunch and dine on the cheapest grey liquor that the furrier and merchant Rosenblunt secretly distilled from stolen sugar beet.

In the end, Nebejas proved himself to be an inventor too by making an air balloon filled with marsh gas. He sewed it together himself from his only suit and filled it with gas from a bog known locally as the “Slain Man”. However, instead of a basket he attached a rope with which he hanged himself.

There was not a breath of wind that day and so the teacher’s naked corpse dangled above the village until firemen from the town of Bzdín arrived with a long enough ladder to pull him down.

Doctor Luftstein, who officially examined the deceased, took pity on him and wrote Smilavoda with an “i” for the place of death on his death certificate.

 

12th May 1945, 12.05pm

He went into the courtyard and his gaze fell on an unsightly, shiny grey patch on the farmhouse wall where Koza the nanny goat liked to scratch her behind on the way back from grazing. He pulled a plank away from a hole in the ground where some lime was maturing – lime which had been slaked before he was born – and filled a bucket with the wobbly white mass. While a loaf was baking in the oven, Augustin gave the whole wall a fresh coat of whitewash. After hundreds of millions of years encased in rock, the crushed shells of Paleozic molluscs reflected the sunlight once again. He cleaned his brush at the pump and the lime water seeped into the ground, leaving behind a white labyrinth in the brown courtyard.

His timing was perfect – from the oven wafted a smell so powerful you could almost touch it, signalling that the bread was just right. He opened the oven door and brought the bread out into the light with a wooden peel. Steam in the sign of the cross issued from the slit crust. As this gift of God began to cool down, it ever so quietly sang to itself.

Apolena came out of the barn with an empty cup in her hand, rinsed out the black strip of coffee and returned it to its place on the sideboard, where a shallow depression had formed over the years. Then she started to get lunch ready.

 

8th October 1899

For once his schoolmate Krajta had not been lying – their rabbit did have the heart of a dictator. Its furious biting, clawing and screeching had made a slave out of the old ram, who was many times its size, and it had then gone on to terrorize the whole farm. Even the vicious watchdog crawled into his kennel when he saw it, and the gleam would vanish from the eyes of the one-ton bull called Satan under its rheumy stare. The rabbit took a special liking to the ram’s warm, soft, fleece-covered back. Sprawling there like a lord, he let it carry him around his rabbit kingdom and slept on it at night.

Soon the rabbit cast its demonic spell over the farmer and his entire family. For this was no ordinary rabbit but a pure-bred Belgian Giant, a champion breed, bought by Krajta’s father in distant Prague at an exhibition by the Central Union of Czechoslovak Rabbit Breeders, and it had been hellishly expensive, so they couldn’t kill it. However, the rabbit made the mistake that all those who are too powerful make: it believed nothing could happen to it and let its guard down, and that was to cost it its neck.

It met its doom when a band of travellers came roaming across the sleeping village of Smylavoda. Here some hens disappeared from a coop, there a pot of pears went missing from a cellar. And even though in the morning the peasants who had been robbed called the thieves every name under the sun, everyone accepted it as the way things were and part of folklore. After all, if Gypsies had to work, then who would play the cimbalom and the tambourine until their souls danced out of their bodies? Who would tell fortunes from the lines in your palm or from coffee grounds?

That autumn night, the Krajta’s evil rabbit was resting on its laurels and awoke on a bay leaf in the Gypsy camp. Everyone was so relieved that the following day old Krajta sent the Gypsies via the local policeman a bottle of Augustin’s new liquor – candy schnapps.

The Hnát family, in contrast to this, had only nice, peaceable rabbits. Every morning Augustin would lovingly chop up some juicy young nettles and couch grass for them and then watch as they busily munched away.

The Krajta family looked down on rabbit meat and at most would use it minced to bulk out the pork meatloaf for the farmhands so that it would go further. The Hnáts, on the other hand, loved rabbit cooked in every possible way.

Every Sunday, Grandma Rozálie would choose the plumpest male, lift him up by the ears and tell him as usual: “Everything repeats itself and people never learn from it”, and then with one sharp flick of the edge of her wrinkled palm brought his soft existence to an end.

After that Granddad Vavřinec took charge of the rabbit. He slit it open and left it to bleed, hung it by its hind legs from the planks of the fence and gutted it with one clean cut. He kept only the liver, heart and kidneys for food; the blood and the rest of the innards went into an old pot for the flies to feast upon. After a few days the pot would begin to writhe with hatched larvae which were used as a nutritious snack for the roosters – although they were actually hens, in Smylavoda they were all called roosters.

He then pulled off the rabbit skin and left it hanging from the fence for the furrier to see. Once a week, on Wednesdays, Samuel Rosenblut would go around the village to collect them in a goat-drawn cart. All bedecked in rabbit skins, he resembled a furry tree, and he rang a bell, bleated at the goat and called out in both Yiddish and Czech: “Koyfn – pelts! Folks – furs!” He would expertly rub the skins between his fingers and stroke his cheek with them voluptuously. He would perform his ritual of haggling for a while before offering a good price – the Hnáts’ rabbits had wonderfully soft fur which was as black as an August night, ideal for making top-quality felt for rabbis’ hats.

The tender rabbit meat was then cooked in seven different alternating ways: in a creamy vegetable sauce, in garlic, in a rosehip sauce, with dried plums, in rosemary, with mushrooms, or – best of all –with onions.

You take the rabbit’s head and heart, thus ending the conflict between reason and emotion, and use them to make a stock as strong as a stockade. Finely chop half a dozen onions and fry them in rendered bacon until golden. Then let the hot onions enfold the rabbit, sprinkled with salt and cut into six pieces, in their loving embrace. Sear the meat and then add a bay leaf, thyme and pepper. Pour in the hot broth and simmer until tender. Transfer the meat to the pot, sieve the onion and the juices, and then pour the resulting sauce over the meat and cook it all together for a while with the lid on. You’ll know it’s ready when the rabbit begins to smell unbearably good. Then sauté the kidneys and the sliced liver and return them to the rabbit on the plate – which, fortunately, will not be enough to revive it.

What Augustin loved best out of the whole rabbit was the nice crust on the ribs with its lining of tender fat. But he never told anyone, because if he had, his older brother Libor would have eaten it on purpose, even if he didn’t like it. The only family member who knew his secret was Granddad Vavřinec, and he would always give Augustin a forkful of the best pieces from his own plate.

And just as the family was polishing off the small bones from the onion sauce, Zmok the town crier came out onto the square to announce that after Sunday mass they would be choosing the cabbage treaders.

Smylavoda’s pickled cabbage was famed far and wide and was much in demand – just like Pilsner beer, brandy from Cognac, Iberian ham from the Pedroches Valley or marzipan from Lubeck. Not only was the local cabbage more tender and juicy than anywhere else, it was also distinguished by the wonderfully subtle flavour that it got from the addition of grated horseradish, mustard seeds, apple and caraway, which grew on the other side of the cemetery wall, where suicides were buried. What really made it special, however, was it gained most in its flavour from the lactic fermentation in the bowels of a huge earthenware vat known as the cabbager, which occupied most of the cellar underneath the town hall. These days no-one could remember who had built this monster and, more importantly, how they had managed to get it into the cellar, as the only access was through a corridor much narrower than the cabbager.

One theory suggested that the barrel had been broken into pieces, taken to the cellar and then put back together again. However, this was refuted by the fact that no cracks were to be found on the cabbager. Another hypothesis was that the cabbager had first been formed out of clay and then fired inside the cellar itself. However, most of the villagers believed the old tale that the cabbager had been brought there long ago by giants who pickled people in it. It was only later that the town hall had been built on top of it.

Wherever the truth lay, the people of Smylavoda had kept their gigantic cabbager a secret. They didn’t even know about it in neighbouring Kosmo, while Kadlub the parish priest had only the slightest inkling.

The whole village lived for pickled cabbage. Since time immemorial the cabbage ritual had had its unchanging order and traditions, which everyone scrupulously observed. Each year in the autumn, as soon as the cabbage was ripe in the fields, they chose two “treaders” – the boy and girl with the most beautiful feet. Everyone shredded the heads of cabbage themselves and brought it to the cabbager, where the town crier weighed the cabbage and issued a certificate for it. The treaders then walked on the shredded cabbage all night until they had treaded all the air out of it. After six weeks the cabbage was ready and everyone could load their share into a normal fermentation crock and take it home.

It was a great honour to be a treader, and you also received a bonus in the form of the stalks from all of the shredded heads. That was why for years now Augustin had been treating his legs with a decoction of marigold and rich mud from the local swamp “The Slain Man”. So now he couldn’t wait until Sunday, when the decision was to be made.

No sooner had the organ finished playing in the new church with the miniature nave and oversized tower than the young people from the entire village assembled in front of the town cabbager. Peprník the mayor and Stojespal the blacksmith then inspected, sniffed and even licked everyone’s feet, and after much deliberation chose Augustin Hnát and Lenka Číšecká.

They scrubbed both children’s feet with river sand and soap, and then steamed them over a pot of boiling water until they turned red. With the aid of a pulley and rope they were hoisted to the top of the cabbager, where they jumped down onto the pile of shreddings. The strips of cabbage cushioned their fall better than a plump duvet.

They stood face to face with their hands on each other’s waists. Then they began to dance inside the vat to the music of their young hearts, which began to beat to the same rhythm. Inhaling the intoxicatingly pungent fumes from the cabbage sap sent them into a blissful trance, and the lumps of cabbage squeezed erotically through the spaces between their toes.

At first he tried to look down at the cabbage, but Lenka’s big eyes, the colour of morning grass, soon drew him towards them, and Augustin drowned in them for so long that he submitted to death and was reborn in the knowledge that she and she alone was the one for him, the woman of his life, destined to be his until the end of all days and nights.

His heart pounded, the cabbage squelched, and her firm hips burned his hands, but he felt no tiredness or pain, and he would gladly have danced and danced with her until he fell down from exhaustion.

Towards morning the air bubbles stopped rising from the shreddings. When they finally hauled them out from the cabbager onto dry land, Augustin and Lenka already had one foot in the land of nod. And even after they had been washed and put to bed, they continued to tread invisible cabbage in their sleep.

 

12th May 1945, 1.03pm

Apolena called to him from the kitchen range to bring some cabbage. He went down into the cellar, lifted the lid of the fermentation crock out of the water-filled groove and shook off the drops. Then he placed it on his head like an earthenware hat to free up his hands and ladled small clumps of cabbage into a bowl. Because the lid was quite large, he had to balance it carefully on the top of his head. When the bowl was full, he turned the ladle on its side and let the cloudy liquid run down it. He closed his eyes, tilted his head back and with slow sips revelled in the sweet-and-sour flavour of the juice.

Its sensuous bouquet conjured up memories which he quickly pushed aside. That night when he fell in love with her would never return. The two most important ingredients were now missing, never to be found again – Lenka was dead and the cabbager had been blown to pieces by the Germans.

He took the lid off his head and put it back in its place.

Their meagre wartime lunch consisted of celeriac cutlets with potato and cabbage mash. It was difficult to find it among the celeriac, but he managed to do so and gave his daughter the best pieces from his own plate.

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Zuzana Brabcová

Aviaries
Voliéry

(Druhé město, 128 pages)

Aviaries is a posthumously published text from the recently deceased author of one of the first Czech novels to openly describe lesbian relations, Year of Pearls, which has been translated into many languages. Aviaries is an intimate diary account of neurotically oversensitive perception of the world around us. As in her previous works, here too Brabcová works bewitchingly with the language, pulsating from bare recording to supreme metaphors, from lyrical tropes to vulgarity, revealing motifs of being alone and lost in a world that has ceased to make sense. The everyday entries shift to more general and symbolic testimonies. They do not philosophize but cause shock by revealing the grotesque – as if the present generated nothing but black humour, the bizarre, the pompous and the void. The pilgrim has examined the world and now has nowhere to go. There is no longer any paradise of the heart, her own interior world… Brabcová is a Magnesia Litera Award winner and the first ever Jiří Orten Award winner. Aviaries won the Josef Škvorecký Award, has been nominated for the Magnesia Litera Award and an English translation of the novel will be published by Twisted Spoon Press.

Praise

“This sophisticated testimony of social exclusion oscillates between the diary genre, dream entries and fantasy prose.”

— Petr Bílek, Literární noviny

“[Aviaries has] a rich style, figurative language, a combination of absolute introspection and reflections on external situations”

— Josef Chuchma, Lidové noviny

Links

Foreign rights: www.pluh.org
Publisher: druhemesto.cz

Excerpt ▼

20th December 2011

It comes on around four or five in the afternoon, sets in around seven and then takes over for the night. It’s been like that for years – I can’t remember it ever being any different. A day devoted to not going out is a musical score for a melody that nobody has ever played. And if I have to go out all the same, then the people that I pass by have a bloom, a glassy frosting that makes their outlines appear fuzzy; I can imagine they do not exist, and so love them. All that exists merely spoils and disturbs, as if somebody had sprayed over The Night Watch.

The day before yesterday Václav Havel died. In his sleep, in the morning hours. So it does not just take over at night.


21st December 2011

“Gosh, did I cry! I really liked him!” said the woman I bought Nový prostor magazine from at Anděl.

It was around freezing point and she had no gloves. All day long it had been around freezing point and all day she had no gloves. All day long she shuffled up and down by the bus stop.

“Why don’t you have any gloves?”

“They’re expensive,” she replied.

Her top and and bottom teeth were also missing.

They are even more expensive.

I went round the corner to the Christmas market and bought her some gloves. The little round emptiness of her face lit up, while my revulsion over my own gestures contorted me and she clenched the throat of Christmas with them.

22nd December 2011

That bloom is not only on people but also on things, while between me and them looms a mirror rampart, built into the frame at right angles. Smelling of incense, the whole shop tinkles.

I would stand behind the curtain and observe for hours and hours as Míra and Bobeš dribble the ball, a static image in motion, but I do not have a curtain.

I wipe off the dust and look at the dictionary: “Microscopic particles of matter of mineral or organic origin created by a rubbing-off process and settling as dirt.”

Something’s the matter. Something is up. Something isn’t right.

(Translated by Melvyn Clarke)

Zuzana Kultánová

Augustin Zimmermann

(Kniha Zlín, 200 pages)

Although this is Kultánová’s debut novel, the response from critics and readers has been overwhelmingly positive, earning the author a nomination in the Magnesia Litera Award’s Discovery of the Year category. Augustin Zimmermann, the main protagonist of this book which takes place in the 1860s, represents an almost archetypal model of an unhappy person. While the world around him is productive and prosperous during the Industrial Revolution, his family is struggling with an existential crisis exacerbated by his alcoholism and hopeless attempts to succeed in this new world. Augustin’s uncertain past, strange unease and deceitful nature cast a dark shadow on his entire family, which is spiralling into increasing despair and falling to the bottom of the social hierarchy from which there is no escape. The story culminates tragically in Prague’s Josefov quarter, a place of misery, which for centuries was a Jewish ghetto. This is a dark novel inspired by true events, nevertheless it also contains moments of humour. Pitch black humour.

Praise

“Augustin Zimmermann is an exceedingly good debut novella […] The author’s diverse style is full of naturalism and a number of imaginative analogies, yet it retains its clarity.”

— Petr Nagy, Host 8/2016

“An exceptional and uncompromising novel.”

— Aleš Palán, Hospodářské noviny

Links

Publisher: www.knihazlin.cz

Excerpt ▼

It was after lunch on a Sunday when Augustin Zimmermann rose to leave, his rickety chair clattering in the process. His wife asked him where he was off to this time and where he had got the money for booze. By way of reply Zimmerman, a tall man with piercing blue eyes, merely spat out some abuse. “Why are you always fucking going on at me?!” He opened the door and headed out into the Sunday afternoon, muttering something about an old bitch.

It was after lunch on a Sunday when Augustin Zimmermann rose to leave, his rickety chair clattering in the process. His wife asked him where he was off to this time and where he had got the money for booze. By way of reply Zimmerman, a tall man with piercing blue eyes, merely spat out some abuse. “Why are you always fucking going on at me?!” He opened the door and headed out into the Sunday afternoon, muttering something about an old bitch.

The old bitch followed his retreating figure with a sigh. It would be a waste of words, which would run through him like water through a cleaned-out fish head. She placed her veined arms on her lap, then something snapped inside her and she threw an earthenware mug at the door. With an annoyingly loud noise it smashed into several pieces. For a few minutes there was silence. The woman stared into space for a while before getting up to collect the shards, which made a tinkling sound as they spread across the floor like mercury. It was the last decent cup they’d had. She threw the remains of the cup onto the street; they could end up killing someone for all she cared.

Her husband, Augustin Zimmermann, walked along the street in the direction of the pub, though he wasn’t particularly looking forward to it. He loosened his red scarf and for a moment toyed with the idea of going home to his wife, having a chat with the neighbours, letting the day go by, giving the kids a thrashing for good measure and going to work sober in the morning. He felt a strong desire for harmony, a lazy afternoon and a drawn-out Sunday. But how? At home? With his wife? With his neighbours? Or even in the pub? For a moment he thought he could hear festive music being played – the annoying creaking of a barrel-organ and the rattling of a tired old accordion. It all sounded very distant and inhuman. As distant as this day.

It’s this damned thirst, you can’t help it, he said to himself. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been so rough on Františka, but he couldn’t control himself. It was always money, money, money. She constantly went on at him about money and drink – as if he didn’t have enough to deal with already. Alone – he was alone in the world. He would sit by himself today. He had a feeling that the drink wasn’t going to improve his mood, that he wouldn’t join in with the carefree singing or bang his glass on the table. Today he would get darkly, grimly drunk. This Sunday owed him something. The whole world, which was constantly making promises, owed him something, and with interest. But no payment or special rate of interest were forthcoming. They were certainly taking their time about it. Instead his life was a succession of blows. Drudgery and a shortage of everything. Where was the joy in it, why was there none left over for Augustin? And why was there none left for his wife, whose ribs stuck out from under her blouse like a rake from straw?

Augustin kept expecting the world to come rushing up with a sack full of joy and, as if by magic, arrange for he and his missus to have a better life. If only that sack existed, he would be able to find at least an ounce of joy for his eternally sour-faced wife. His wife, for whom nothing was good enough, for whom nothing was sacred, his wife who had no respect for her husband and merely ridiculed him. But the sack was empty and full of holes. And where would the world get this sack of plenty from and why would it give it to him of all people? his wife would laugh at him if she could see into his head. What makes you think that you could be a success? she would ask. Just be glad that you’re still alive.

A sharp stab of indignation passed through Zimmerman. He was struck by a sense of injustice and his head was filled with dark thoughts. He kicked a stone, passed by some people, doffed his cap and loosened his scarf until it fell to the ground. Cursing, he picked it up and put it back on. He’d just as happily hang himself with it. He looked at the woman in front of him – she had broad hips and a fat behind. She waddled like a duck – like a miller’s wife he had once known. Prudent and cautious with money. Expansive, as though you were standing alone in a meadow.

But one day all of her nice chubby flesh was crushed by a mill wheel. During one unfortunate storm she was mercilessly swept between its blades, which tossed her around as though she was not a beautiful, fat, pink human body, but a pile of manure. No-one was able to stop the relentless motion of the wheel. It turned and turned, crushing the body of the plump miller’s wife to a pulp.

It took three pairs of strong arms to extricate the waterlogged body of the miller’s wife and the body of her son, who had jumped in after her. When they pulled them out, they averted their eyes. It was a horrendous sight. Where was the beautiful miller’s wife with the wide hips? Why was there this sack, drenched in water, without beauty or form? Fat millers’ wives should die tucked under their quilts, attended to by distraught relatives and well-wishers, surrounded by daisies and bladdernut rosaries, bathed in sunlight, glory and eternity. Their bodies should ascend to the heavens in a dignified manner with a divine smile. They had no business resembling a rotten, mouldy potato sack, or some poor wretch who’d popped their clogs in the middle of a damp cottage. They dragged her into an outhouse and the abating water, which just moments before had been casting up a furious foam, washed the stones of the river clean of guilt.

It silently wept and regretted. It couldn’t help it. Once in a while the storm would take hold of it and destroy whatever it could until it had worked off its anger, until it had reached such a peak of fury that it could rest again for a few years in the aftermath of its convulsions. One brief, powerful summer storm was all it took to cause the accident which broke the miller’s wife’s neck, the miller’s spirit and all of their son’s limbs. Zimmerman then travelled the countryside telling people of the accident. They wanted to know the details. They wanted to know if the wheel had really pulverized everything.

Zimmerman didn’t know exactly what had happened before the jaws of the water had swallowed her up. How did she get so close to the wheel? She had always been careful, and the children had been forbidden from going within several metres of it. She had sometimes argued about it with her husband, who reproached her for keeping the children away from their trade. The miller’s wife ruled the mill with a firm hand, but she was afraid of it. It is so big, so much bigger than me, she thought as she looked at the large, noisy structure. Water can kill as well as heal, she used to say. It awaits your fear like an alert dog.

The tall, blue-eyed man finally reached the pub. The first thing he did was order a caraway schnapps. Then a beer, a schnapps, a beer, a schnapps. He sat alone, staring at the crowd. The gaudy outfits of the spruced-up workers danced in front of his eyes. The clothes sparkled across the whole pub like glass stones from a fair, and everyone acted as though they were not made of cheap and nasty material. They wanted to give the impression that they were beautiful clothes designed for festive occasions full of hope. The female workers would find themselves male workers, with whom they would lead a miserable, squalid life filled with the hooting of factory chimneys, quarrels and the screaming of hungry children. What wonderful prospects awaited these poor women stuffed into their tawdry outfits, dancing to tired old ditties full of double entendres.

# Just you wait, Marie. Pepík, what for? #

They came here to choose for themselves a rather ragged young man, who would one day be the death of them, but even so it was worth it. To put on a dress, dance, drink and fornicate while you could still pretend that life still might turn out to be one big holiday.

# Just you wait, Marie. Pepík, what for? #

The hurdy-gurdy ground away and the young men shouted over one another, running about the pub like wild dogs, eagerly baring their teeth, clinking bottles, clutching one another. Augustin lost himself in the clamour and drank himself into oblivion. He sat alone. He had no-one to sit with and no-one wanted to sit with him. He wasn’t good company. He went from laughter to swearing and from swearing to laughter – it didn’t make for a great sense of camaraderie. And so he sat alone, staring at the bottle and trying not to sober up. He couldn’t take that kind of pain. A new week lay ahead and he had to make sure he was ready for it. A mild drunkenness would still be with him tomorrow, then he’d sober up, and he’d hold out for a while, but just so that the pain didn’t destroy him, and then he’d be back here again. Františka understood – she was a sensible woman who knew she couldn’t expect anything better from him anyway. A week is so unpredictable. You couldn’t even tell how long a week was going to be. When he had finally drunk away all his money, he paid up with a sense of relief and stumbled out into the street, but being so tall he banged his head against the doorframe on the way out. Cursing, he almost fell over. For a moment his arms waved slowly in the air before he regained his balance.

Trudging through the dark streets, he passed the elegant silhouettes of factory chimneys. They looked like those posh cigarettes wrapped in very thin paper, which Zimmerman would certainly never smoke. The strictly right-angled, classicist streets of the Karlín district undulated and merged into one another. For a moment Augustin really had no idea where he was. He pricked up his ears, but in vain. The roads were suspiciously expansive and yet closed-off at the same time. He found himself in a labyrinth with no exit, full of dead ends and false trails, each of which closed at precisely the moment you wanted to get out. A labyrinth full of dark forests whose thorns pricked his nerves. A moth flew around his head while from somewhere came the scratching of rats. For a moment it seemed to him that he could hear the murmur of the harbour, but it was too far from him. He drove away the idea that he was moving upon water and rummaged around in his pockets for his pipe. He had to have a smoke. This wasn’t normal. He drew in the stink of the cheap tobacco and his stomach heaved. Didn’t a train just go by this way? Leaning against a wall, he stopped and stared into the darkness. His head was splitting and he felt a severe pain just above his eye. He should have stayed in the pub. At least it was safe there. Karlín was far too expansive – it made you nervous, made you hear strange things.

His knees began to buckle under him and he felt very tired. He would have preferred to lie down somewhere and sleep, but then there would be a big fuss if someone saw him there in the morning. Františka would fly into a rage. “Children, just look at your father sleeping in the street like a pig.” He could do without having to listen to that.

He could have done with a drink – his mouth was burning like the fires of hell. Like the blazing furnaces of those awful buildings with their tall, thin, black chimneys constantly belching out smoke. At last he stood in front of his house. The windows were stuffed with rags to keep out the draughts, and in the courtyard the hens slept, bloated like footballs. A hovel which it was better to enter in the darkness. A cursed, rented home. He took hold of the handle and tripped over a bucket. He cursed, wondering who had done it. He decided that his wife must have left the bucket there as a trap for him. She wanted to make a cripple of him – she’d like that. He rattled the handle a few times and when he found that it was open he barged inside. He scooped some water in his cupped hands, slurped it down, undid his scarf and fell onto the mattress.

“Don’t pretend you’re sleeping,” he yelled into the darkness. He needed some respect. He was a working man and a father, and his wife was lying around when she should have been working, and his children were sleeping when they should have been helping.

No-one said anything. Any response would set him off and Františka had to work the next day. As well as making buttons, she was now mending clothes as well and had to work hard. If she replied, her husband would flare up and kick up a fuss until morning. That was what he wanted to do – to let off steam. Not even the hours spent drinking could quench his anger. Augustin sat for a while, rolling his fuzzy tongue around in his mouth, thoughts swirling around in his head, narrowing his eyes like a cat. His pupils darted restlessly this way and that, trying to catch hold of something. Even he didn’t know what, and yet he was sure of what it ought to be. Eventually tiredness overcame him and his stomach also started to bother him. He lay down and started to hiccup. This disturbed everyone. The children clenched their fists, closed their eyes as tightly as they could and tried to sleep. The cold floor was like a stab in the kidneys. The room began to fill with the stench of drunkenness and the drunk’s wife saw red. She bit her hand. Finally, however, after about half an hour, God had mercy on them and Augustin hiccupped for the last time before starting to snore. Meanwhile, the gently rolling hills enfolded Karlín, blowing onto the burning wounds of the endless night.

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)

Marek Toman

The Praise of Opportunism
Chvála oportunismu

(Torst, 420 pages)

Marek Toman is an experienced author and journalist, whose books have been published in English, Finnish, Polish and Hungarian. In his latest novel, Toman has found a truly original voice for the retelling of modern Czech and Central European history: the testimony of the Černín Palace that has been witness to many historical, military, political, and personal events. The author has made the largest Baroque structure in Prague the protagonist, commenting upon the historical events that have passed it by over the centuries. Narrating its own story, the palace describes the turning points in Czech history, from the day it was built up until the present day. Over time, the palace has served as a gallery, a hospital, military barracks, a shelter for the poor, or office of the Reichsprotektor during the Second World War.

Praise

“[…] exceptionally convincing, at the same time thrilling and emotionally charged. Thanks to the truly original form through which The Praise of Opportunism manages to capture the passing of history, the novel bears comparison with the best works of current European fiction: Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, Hilary Mantel’s Tudor saga, or The Great Century by Swedish writer Jan Guillou.”

— Zdenko Pavelka, Právo

“This novel about one of the most remarkable buildings in Prague has an unusually powerful narrative drive and a comic flair.”

— Markéta Pilátová, Hospodářské noviny

Links

Foreign rights: www.praglit.de
Publisher: www.torst.cz

Marek Šindelka

Material Fatigue
Únava materiálu

(Odeon, 208 pages)

Material Fatigue is the first novel by a Czech author to address the European migrant crisis. Šindelka is an award-winning young writer whose books are popular with readers both in the Czech Republic and abroad, having been published in Dutch, Polish, Bulgarian and Hungarian. The hero of this book is an unnamed teenage boy who finds himself in a foreign country in the middle of Europe, which in his eyes looks like nothing more than a complex of fences, overpasses, railway corridors and warehouses. Travelling through the cold winter landscape, he is denied real life, moving like a shadow on the periphery of the country and society. He is trying to get to a city in the north where he had been heading with his older brother Aamir, before they were split up by people smugglers. Although the novel is based on the current migration crisis, it explores universal themes of alienation, the loss of one’s home and roots. Šindelka depicts the reduction of the lives of ‘foreigners’, artificially created enemies, to a problem, manpower, material. Material Fatigue has been nominated for the EU Prize for Literature and the Magnesia Litera Award.

Praise

“Šindelka’s prose is strongest in its descriptions of the physical experiences of the refugees. Animal instincts seem to awaken in the main characters when their lives are threatened. Some of the insights are extremely powerful.”

— Daniel Konrád, Hospodářské noviny

“[Šindelka] is able to convey the movement of every muscle, twitching nerves as well as the effects of the elements: snow, wind, ice or clouds and their fluctuations which are indifferent to humans. These parts have an almost existential dimension.”

— Josef Chuchma, Lidové noviny 3/1/2017

“Šindelka’s book is profoundly lyrical.”

— Veronika Dvorská, A2 3/17

Links

Author website: mareksindelka.wordpress.com
Foreign rights: www.pluh.org
Publisher: odeon-knihy.cz

Emil Hakl

Uma’s Version
Umina verze

(Argo, 208 pages)

Hakl is a Czech literary celebrity, best known for his novel Of Kids and Parents, which has also been turned into a successful film. His books have been translated into many languages, including English, German and Dutch. Hakl’s latest novel addresses a hot topic in science and technology — the creation of an artificial human. In Uma’s Version, humanity’s Frankenstein-like desire to create a humanoid robot is fulfilled in genuinely amateur conditions. However, this does not prevent the two main characters from experiencing an intense relationship based on mutual affection, which eventually turns into an addiction, conspiratorial friendship and sex. This is a novel about love with a plot which incorporates detective novel elements and is written in the authors typically efficient and fast-paced style.

Praise

“Hakl chose a brilliant topic for this book. Questions about how we will coexist with robots, humanoids and other technological creations are appealing for everyone.”

— Monika Zavřelová, MF Dnes

“The beginning of [Uma’s Version] has atmosphere and a fast pace. […] It will be easy for readers to quickly get through Uma’s Version, it won’t be a problem to read the book in two evenings, maybe even just one.”

— Jarda Konáš, Aktuálně.cz

Links

Author website: www.emilhakl.cz
Foreign rights: www.pluh.org
Publisher: www.argo.cz

Cover image: An illustration by Martin Salajka from The Lake (Host, 2016).

Books for child and adolescent readers have traditionally held a very strong position in Czech literature, and original Czech works can boast an excellent reputation internationally. Proof of this can be found in the titles of Czech origin on the IBBY honour list, exceptional recognition awarded at Bologna Children’s Book Fair or awards for translated editions given by the literary bodies of individual nations.

As we look back at the last decade, we are delighted to observe that the market share of literature for children and young people is increasing; clearly, publishers see a future in children’s books. Confirming this trend are the books produced by larger, well-established publishers founded in the 1990s, which focus largely on literary fiction or popular science for adults (Argo, Host and Paseka), but whose lists today include a growing proportion of books aimed at child, adolescent and young adult readers that branches off from standard production; these books are also collecting domestic and foreign literary prizes. The position of children’s graphic novels is also being consolidated and the range of concertina books for the smallest readers has grown substantially.

The Czech publishing houses particularly specialising in titles for children and young people traditionally include Albatros (the oldest and largest publisher, which has been systematically publishing kidlit since 1949; over the last decade it has brought out approximately 150 titles a year, including translations), Meander (founded in 1995 and publishing around 25 titles annually, primarily original Czech books), Baobab (a family publisher founded at the turn of the millennium focusing largely on picture books, publishing around two dozen titles per year) and Prague-based Labyrint’s Raketa imprint (founded in 2004; two-thirds of the approximately twenty books it publishes annually are kidlit, including graphic novels).

Over the last decade, the already mentioned Brno-based publisher Host has produced a varied and ever-growing selection of kidlit. Host was the first publisher to introduce Czech readers to best-sellers from Poland and Ukraine (Mizielinski, Dziubak, Bula) and the market success of both translated and domestic titles has resulted in a greater focus on original Czech books for children. Today Host has published around four dozen kidlit titles, including graphic novels and YA, with translated books still predominating; however, those originally written in Czech are exceptionally high in quality and are frequently nominated for industry prizes, such as the Golden Ribbon [Zlatá stuha], The Most Beautiful Czech Book of the Year or the Magnesia Litera prize.

Paseka is unrivalled in the kidlit field primarily due to the titles The Oddsockeaters (Lichožrouti, 2008–2013) by Pavel Šrut and Dustzone (Prašina, 2018–2020) by Vojtěch Matocha. Since 2015 it has also systematically published graphic novels, including some big international names as well as significant Czech artist-writers, such as Štěpánka Jislová, married couple Tereza Kopečká and Tomáš Kopečký, and Jindřich Janíček, whose popularity is growing in the Czech market.

Prague-based publisher Argo (which publishes Tove Jansson and David Walliams in Czech translation) has grown its list of original Czech kidlit, principally since 2020, and has enriched it with first-time authors and graphic novelists, including in particular the outstanding Tomáš Peřina, Martin Čepa and Kateřina Čupová.

However, small independent publishers founded in the new millennium have also contributed to writing the history of Czech kidlit between 2015-2025, and they have made the greatest effort to boost bibliodiversity in the Czech book market: Bylo nebylo founded by Anna Pleštilová and Helena Černohorská, 65. pole founded by Tomáš Brandejs (both in 2007), Verzone founded by Veronika Benešová Hudečková (in 2010), Běžíliška founded by František Havlůj and Šárka Svobodná (in 2013), LUX founded by Michal Štěpánek (in 2017) and POP-PAP founded by Marcela Konárková Vostřelová (in 2017). The Roma literature publisher KHER also started to focus on child and adolescent readers in 2022. Isolated titles about dying and death are contributed to Czech literature by publishing house Cesta domů [The Way Home], which supports the home hospice charity of the same name.

From quarantine to controlling emotions

The Czech book market shrank due to the global covid pandemic and accompanying socio-economic changes. The number of books published in the last decade has fallen from a total of approximately 16 000 volumes in 2015 to roughly 13 000 in 2023/2024, according to the Report on the Czech Book Market, drawn up every year by the professional organisation The Association of Czech Booksellers and Publishers. The children’s and young people’s literature sector (both originally written in Czech and translated, both fiction and non-fiction) constitutes around a tenth of the total production of Czech books.

Experiences of the pandemic have also appeared in several children’s book titles, of which the most distinctive – across genres and age ranges – is Marka Míková’s The Coat and the Handbag (Kabát a kabelka, 2021, Argo), illustrated by Galina Miklínová, which was awarded a Golden Ribbon and the Magnesia Litera prize 2022. This humorously told fantasy story depicts two ordinary items, an old pink handbag and an overcoat, falling in love and wandering together through Prague’s empty streets. The richly illustrated interactive book by journalist Irena Hejdová The Deed Ran Away (Skutek utek!, 2022, Host, illustrated by Veronika Zacharová), for pre-schoolers and younger schoolchildren, takes as its theme the demands placed on family life during lockdown, when schools were closed and working from home was mandatory. The silent book Gran (Babi, 2023, Host) by Martina Trchová is an extraordinary artistic achievement – a picture album reflecting intergenerational separation, a granddaughter’s longing to see her grandmother and the desire to stay in touch using memories and the imagination. A special mention in the Bologna Ragazzi Awards 2025 turned the international spotlight onto this book. Ideas about the impact of digitalisation on our lives and on the limits of state responsibility and freedom were reflected in František Tichý’s Recruit 244 (Rekrut 244, 2022, Baobab).

Another of the pandemic’s repercussions for kidlit – with no explicit references – is the obvious increase in books devoted to children’s feelings, emotionality and psyche. These titles frequently anticipate other readers, that is, adult guides who can both support child readers and also learn how to approach emotionally fraught situations as they read. A wealth of translations in this field supplements popular science and interactive publications: Ester Stará, all illustrated by Milan Starý: The Book of Feelings (Kniha pocitů, 2022, Pasparta); Super Máňa (Super Máňa, 2023, Pikola); Super Máňa and Big Dog Love (Super Máňa a velká psí láska, 2024, Pikola); Lenka Blaze: Softy (Cíťa, 2022, Blaze.je); Mum and Dad Aren’t Together Any More (Máma s tátou už nejsou spolu, 2024, Blaze.je, Most Beautiful Czech Book of the Year prize) but also Noemi Cupalová’s story book about respect Karlíček and the Wasps (Karlíček a vosy, 2021, Běžíliška, illustrated by Hana Šradějová, Most Beautiful Czech Book of the Year prize) or interpersonal relationships and self-acceptance Stupid Vendula (Blbá Vendula, 2024, Běžíliška, illustrated by Eva Horská). Cupalová’s writing focuses on conflict behaviour, and in her newest book, for children of around ten, called Stupid Vendula, she provides two parallel versions of the story in columns of different colours: Vendula is having problems at school, at home, with her friends, until at a certain moment she realises that she can either continue to coast along in her vicious circle of anger and negative emotions, or she can take responsibility for her life, pluck up her courage and attempt to break through the obstacle barrier.

Fear of the dark and of otherness

Fear and attempts to understand or overcome it are frequent themes in kidlit (Martina Špinková: Fear, a strange fellow (Divný brach strach, 2015, Cesta domů), Jana Šrámková: Zuza in Gardens (Zuza v zahradách, 2015, Labyrint, illustrated by Andrea Tachezy). There is a surprising number of remarkable titles about fear of the dark: a loving look at an uncanny walk through a summer night is provided by artist Marie Štumfová’s Klárka and the Night Garden (Klárka a noční zahrada, 2023, Portál); while David Košťák’s When the Dark Pours In Through the Keyhole (Když se klíčovou dírkou rozlije tma, 2023, Knižní stezka k dětem, illustrated by Anna Kulíčková) is a celebration of children’s imaginativeness in which a child’s bedroom comes to life after dark. The graphic novel artist Toy Box works with a child’s imagination that can see real danger in many forms in a piece of dark fabric caught on a tree after a night storm in the book Dark (Tma, 2021, Paseka). Dora Kaprálová inserts a motif of existential angst, plus backdrops that border on horror, into the night story Mr Nobody and the White Darkness (Pan Nikdo a bílá tma, 2022, Baobab, illustrated by Darja Čančíková) about children meeting a monster.

Jana Šrámková’s poetically written Fánek the Star Sailor (Fánek hvězdoplavec, 2022, Běžíliška), is imbued with particularly strong emotions – anxiety, love, hope – with mysterious, playful illustrations by the originally Belarusian artist Margharita Khavanski; it was the winning title in the books for children and young people category in the Magnesia Litera prize of 2023. Fánek’s dad is leaving to work abroad, and in the real world only occasional letters and telephone calls enable contact with him, with memories and internal monologues in Fánek’s head. The boy deals with his pain and loneliness using his imagination and dreams about the stars and starships. The pared-back text is shot through with Biblical allusions and messages about the power of forgiveness. Jana Šrámková partially references the motifs in her previous book for small children Brothers in the Field (Bratři v poli, 2017, Běžíliška, illustrated by Markéta Prachatická), in which the inseparable friends ground squirrel and vole also dream of travelling into space, but Dageš must patiently wait for Mapík until he “returns” from hibernation.

A number of stories also reflect otherness or deviations from the norm perceived in the most varied of ways and complex life situations facing the child protagonists. In this respect, the book series There’s a catch (Má to háček), jointly published since 2016 by Albatros and Pasparta, can only attract praise. Around a dozen books for younger school-age readers cover subjects such as parental divorces, shared custody, bullying in school, illness, learning disabilities and the like. The psychological novel by Ivona Březinová Roar Quietly, Bro (Řvi potichu, brácho, 2016, Albatros/Pasparta, illustrated by Tomáš Kučerovský), aimed at older readers, has as its protagonist a twin boy with autistic spectrum disorder. Březinová, an experienced kidlit author, introduces this topic to Czech literature with sensitivity and understanding. Questions of gender identity are presented with a high level of empathy and artistic invention by Marto Kelbl in her graduation work Neither Girl nor Boy (Ani holka ani kluk, 2023, Paseka) now published as a book. This illustrated story with graphic-novel elements and a number of educational inserts shows non-binary identities in a broad historical and social context. The author’s other books also deserve attention: the collection of palindromes There and Back (Tam a zpět, 2023, Meander, Golden Ribbon 2024) or her illustrations to the book about discovering the world for the smallest readers The Beginning and the End by Michal Štěpánek (Začátek a konec, 2023, Lux).

Publishing house Kher dedicates exemplary care to the Roma literary tradition. In recent years it has published several noteworthy titles for readers of all ages: Eva Danišová’s playful picture book One, Two, Three (Jekh, duj, trin, 2025), with elements of Romanes, is aimed at preschoolers, while older children will be captivated by the bilingual fairytale Stray Dog by poet and groundbreaking Roma feminist Tera Fabiánová (Čavargoš/Tulák, 2023, illustrated by Magdalena Rutová, translated by Milena Hübschmannová), which depicts life in a Roma settlement from the perspective of a stray dog. Growing up in the normalisation period is autobiographically recorded by Michal Šamko in his first book Maypoles and Totem Poles (Májky a totemy, 2023, illustrated by Petr Polák), while the experience of being an outsider in the modern Czech Republic as seen by two high school students, one half-Roma and the other half-Vietnamese, is informed by a considerable dose of irony in the socially critical novella, Me, Tran and Everything Else (Já, Tran a všechno ostatní, 2025, illustrated Sára Paldanová), by new author Martin Kanaloš, and is aimed at adolescents and young adults.

A subtle environmental appeal

Ecology, sustainability and human attitudes to nature have become a hot topic in children’s books, alongside mental health and the acceptance of otherness. Rather than being primarily educational books, the environmental appeal forms part of a more complex message. Kidlit provides the ideal opportunity, because it has long been indebted to nature motifs – flora and fauna are an integral part of how children discover the world around us.

Lucie Hášová Truhelková’s Grandpa in Pink Trousers (Dědeček v růžových kalhotách, 2021, Albatros, illustrated by Andrea Tachezy) is aimed at pre-school children and was nominated for a Golden Ribbon. The pink on the cover literally glows – first and foremost it denotes Grandpa’s eccentricity, but ultimately his trousers become a placeholder for fast fashion. While the ecological link is entirely obvious, the book’s key theme is the relationship between Grandpa and his grandson. Nor is the felling of rainforests the main theme in Michal Šanda’s Rio the Polar Bear Saves the Rainforest (Lední medvěd Rio zachraňuje prales, 2023, Meander); the polar bear sails to warmer climes on a small iceberg, where he helps his new friends by preventing the destruction of the jungle.

A fairytale explanation of climate change is provided by Frostbite (Omrzlina, 2024, Host), by sisters Kateřina (text) and Zuzana (illustrations) Čupová. The quirky child narrator adds humour to this dynamic story, which introduces middle-grade readers to the Frozen Nation and explains why the world is losing ice. Incidentally, relationships with nature also make an appearance in Zuzana Čupová’s writing début Trees (Stromové, 2024, Knižní stezka k dětem). The writing in this playfully anthropomorphic, encyclopaedic overview of trees in the Czech landscape won a Golden Ribbon 2025.

The much-praised family book The Bicycle (Kolo, 2024, Paseka, Golden Ribbon 2025) by poet and translator Ondřej Buddeus, with distinctive illustrations by Jindřich Janíček, also touches on sustainability. Aimed at children and adults alike, this exceptionally informative, playful non-fiction book scores points for both text and graphics, and investigates its central theme – the bicycle – from many perspectives. It covers urbanism, ecology and the social context in addition to the history of cycling and its health benefits. The message of concertina book The Little Red Ball by Michal Štěpánek (Malý červený míč, Lux, 2024, illustrated by Filip Pošivač), about a little boy searching for his lost ball with the help of a stray dog, is also that there is no need to throw out everything that is broken. This book, for readers aged two and over, highlights the importance of patience and of helping each other.

A space for strong characters

We find nature overlapping into metaphysics in many recent books; this is an exceptionally strong tradition in Czech kidlit, and the books have also been recognised internationally (let us mention Josef Lada, Jiří Trnka, Vojtěch Kubašta, Miroslav Šašek, Květa Pacovská and Petr Sís). Emphasis on the informational, educational side is frequently indivisible from the books’ distinctive aesthetics, meaning they can be described as artistic-scientific publications. The last decade has demonstrated that this approach is exceptionally attractive to young creators and artists who, inspired by a rapidly changing society, create an original response to it.

Tereza Říčanová is a renowned artist whose work is associated with the publishing house Baobab. Her appealing illustrated guide This is Istanbul (To je Istanbul, 2019, Baobab) follows in the footsteps of the famous series of illustrated guides to European metropolises that Miroslav Šašek started to publish as early as the late 1940s. More frequently, however, Říčanová focuses on the theme of the close connection between human beings and nature and natural cycles, be this agricultural work with animals, in Ms Říčanová’s Cow (Kráva Říčanová, 2021, Baobab), shortlisted for the Magnesia Litera prize, or the more subtle position of her latest The Forest (Les, 2024, Baobab), a sovereign artistic achievement that also showcases the author’s feeling for language, almost poetic in places, yet entirely comprehensible. Zbyšek wanders through the woods on a sort of pilgrimage, on which he listens intently, up to the moment when a monster appears and tears the forest to shreds with its teeth and claws. Zbyšek later works to restore it. Characterised by a heady atmosphere, the book stimulates perception via the senses and ultimately gives hopeful information about the resilience of nature’s natural order.

A is for Antarctica: A View from the Other Side (A jako Antarktida. Pohled z druhé strany, 2019, Labyrint, Magnesia Litera prize, Golden Ribbon) by conceptual artist David Böhm convincingly conveys the information that there are places where human beings may never have set foot. This playful, informative encyclopaedia makes use of a whole range of artistic techniques and folding pages to provide an interactive experience that overlaps into philosophy. Böhm blends scientific knowledge and existential questions – this time with regard to the timeline of life on this planet – in another of his books Now. Before You Finish Reading this Sentence, 21 Children Will Be Born on Earth (Teď. Než dočteš tuto větu, narodí se na Zemi 21 dětí, 2023, Labyrint). He is also a contributor to the internationally recognised title The City for Everyone: A Beginner Urbanist’s Manual (Město pro každého. Manuál urbanisty začátečníka, 2020, Labyrint, text Osamu Okamura, illustrated by David Böhm and Jiří Franta, photography by Pavel Horák, Bologna Ragazzi Award, Czech Grand Design 2021).

The large-format book I, Octopus (Já, chobotnice, 2022, Baobab), by Magdalena Rutová also conveys a powerful environmental appeal. Rutová won the Illustrator of the Year prize in the Czech Grand Design awards, and the book also won a Golden Ribbon and the Bologna Ragazzi Award 2024. The likeable eponymous animal heroine no longer wants to live in the sea, but wishes to discover the human world so she can write a book about it. Her adventures and her view of what goes on around her will ultimately inspire the planet’s human inhabitants. Let us also mention Magdalena Rutová’s success as a writer as well as an illustrator. She exemplifies the type of illustrator whose artwork develops and puts the finishing touches to a text, which is proved, for example, by The Unreal Adventures of Florentin Flowers (Neskutečná dobrodružství Florentina Flowerse, 2019, Baobab, text by Marek Toman), Tomatoes and Bananas (Rajčaťáci a banáni, 2023, Host, text by Petr Váša), in the bilingual book Stray Dog (Čavargoš/Tulák, 2023, Kher, text by Tera Fabiánová) or the enchanting story about the overlap between the human and animal worlds, The Parrot and the Vixen (Žako a Stopotvorná, 2024, Baobab, text by Alžběta Dvořáková).

Tereza Ščerbová also chooses protagonists from the animal kingdom. Her YA philosophical fairytale Kooki (Krtník, 2016, Host, Golden Ribbon 2017) shines artistically and is concerned with searching for your own identity.

Guides to the worlds of mice, insects and fungi

A number of other significant nature-themed books from the last decade also have a didactic dimension. Tereza Vostradovská’s large-format publications Playful Science (Hravouka, 2016, Běžíliška, Golden Ribbon 2017) and Playful Journeys (Hravocesta, 2021, Běžíliška) also deserve attention. The detailed, realistic illustrations and playful tasks for pre-school and younger primary school readers also serve as useful learning materials. The story of the little mouse who decides to create her own encyclopaedia about nature is supplemented by an app for mobile devices, so it can also be used for outdoor activities.

Aneta Františka Holasová’s Ipsík’s Tale (Pohádka o Ipsíkovi, 2016, Běžíliška) also encourages the readers’ desire to learn to read and write while realistically reflecting the life of insects. The theme is not far removed from that of her début, Lumír Keeps Bees or the Honey Spelling Book (Lumír včelaří aneb Medový slabikář, 2013, Labyrint), which was devoted to the annual cycle of bees; she also remains faithful to nature motifs in her role of illustrator, e.g., for The Herbalist (Bylinkář) and The Secret of the Old Garden (Tajemství staré zahrady) by Monika Golasovská, 2019 and 2022 respectively, both published by Labyrint. Tereza Marianová’s work also focuses on flora and fauna. Her trilogy of verses about plants, Flower Boards, Shrub Boards, Tree Boards (Květolelo, Keřolelo, Stromolelo, 2022–2023, Meander) is aimed at the smallest readers, while Street Rascals (Uličníci, 2023) is devoted to urban wildlife. She has also treated, in an encyclopaedic fashion, the subjects of Czech hunting Oh Dear Oh Deer (To jsem z toho jelen, 2019, Pikola) and horse-racing The Grand Story of the Grand Pardubice Steeplechase (Velký příběh Velké pardubické, 2020, Albatros).

Many artistic and educational books are encyclopaedic in nature and frequently result from a long-term creative collaboration between the author and the illustrator. For example, publishing house Baobab have issued a number of impressive titles from the workshop of Jiří Dvořák and the Slovak artist Daniela Olejníková. The Vermin Book (Havětník, 2015) is full of lice, fleas, mites, caterpillars and all sorts of other insects, yet it is also poetic, adventurous and informative. How We Live (Bydlíme, 2019) again demonstrates how humans and animals create their own homes. However, the apex of their collaborative work so far is Myco. The Complete Bulletin from the World of Fungi (Myko. Kompletní zpravodaj ze světa hub, 2023). The Magnesia Litera prize confirmed its quality in 2024, as did the main prize in the non-fiction category of the prestigious international Bologna Children’s Book Fair. These awards highlight innovative graphic design, scientific accuracy and attractively presented contents. These books foreground Jiří Dvořák’s strengths: communicating encyclopaedic subjects via stories, poetic approaches to language and playful ideas – framed on this occasion in the form of a bulletin about mushrooms created by the mushrooms themselves.

Illustrators reanimating history

Artistic-educational children’s publications frequently focus on history. In recent years we have observed a tendency to mediate historical themes primarily using stories with a journey-through-time motif, or directly in the biographical graphic novel genre. However, such works also include titles with a significant artistic element in their storytelling. The large-format book Áďa Fell into the Canal (Áďa spadla do kanálu, 2018, Albatros) by graphic designer Sylva Francová, aimed at younger schoolchildren, accompanies a little girl around Prague’s historical sites (and has a framing story with a problematic sibling relationship as its theme).

The prize-winning illustrator Renáta Fučíková is the most prominent producer of picture books that process historical material. Her educational titles effectively seek ways to make the subject as accessible as possible to the modern reader. For example, her book Shakespeare (2016, Vyšehrad, Golden Ribbon 2017) introduces a dozen of the playwright’s plays, enriched with a comprehensible interpretation touching on sources of inspiration and the cultural-historical context. Over 400 illustrations capturing the ambience of the eras described put the finishing touches to the written text. She has also turned the spotlight on other greats of world drama: Molière (2017, Golden Ribbon), Chekhov (2021) and Goethe (2024), and she covers the period of ancient Czech history in the book Queens and Pilgrims: Stories of the First Millennium (Královny a poutníci. Příběhy prvního tisíciletí, 2023, Albatros). As an illustrator she has worked with a number of experienced writers, such as Radek Malý (Franz Kafka: A Man of His and Our Time, Franz Kafka. Člověk své i naší doby, 2017, Práh) and Markéta Pilátová (The Little Girl on the Postage Stamp, Holčička ze známky, 2024, Práh; Birds of Passage: Stories of Czech Exile and Immigration, Tažní ptáci. Příběhy českého exilu a imigrace, 2025, Universum).

Rising stars from two centres

Renáta Fučíková is also a superb educator – she is the head of the Didactic Illustration studio at the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art, University of West Bohemia in Plzeň (Pilsen), where she transmits her rich experience to students gradually establishing themselves as a strong new generation of illustrators. These newcomers are gaining ground both as individuals (Marto Kelbl, Tereza Marianová and Štěpánka Jislová) and in joint projects, including the excellent titles Heroines. The Stories of Significant Czech Women (Hrdinky. Příběhy významných českých žen, 2020, Universum, Golden Ribbon), Velvet Effect: 1988–1992 (2020, Albatros, texts by Petr Švec and Renáta Fučíková) about the course and context of the Velvet Revolution, or The Unforgettable 1920s: A Guide to the Essential Decade in Modern History (Nezapomenutelná dvacátá. Průvodce zásadním desetiletím novodobých dějin, 2023, Universum) about the young Czechoslovak Republic’s heyday.

Graduates of the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague are also becoming known as distinctive illustrators. Nikola Logosová (Illustrator of the Year 2019 in the annual Czech Grand Design awards) has provided intensely colourful illustrations for the concertina book Recorded Delivery (Rekomando, 2015, Běžíliška, text by Robin Král), the story The Eve of St Nicholas by Lukáš Csicsely (Předvečer svatého Mikuláše, 2017, Meander), the history of medicine in seven days Watch Out, A Doctor! by Petr Svobodný (Pozor, doktor!, 2019, Běžíliška), the “handbook” to human personalities and professions I, a Human Being by Olga Stehlíková (Já, člověk, 2021, Albatros) or Petra Soukupová’s two-volume series The Weird Kids’ Club (Klub divných dětí, 2019, 2023, Host). Her authorial début, the illustrated World Atlas – Europe (Atlas světa – Evropa, Lux) was published in 2023, and introduces the landscapes, places of interest, inhabitants and culture of individual European countries using original, mosaic images.

Nikola Hoření, also a graduate of the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, has focused on collaborating with publishing house Meander, where she has demonstrated her abilities as an author of concertina books about experiencing emotions: Karla is Crying (Karla pláče), Hubert is Angry (Hubert se vzteká), Ida is Happy (Ida se raduje) and Tonča is Scared (Tonča se leká) (2020–2023). She deployed her expressive, seemingly naive style in Michal Šanda’s poetry collection for the smallest readers, How do you do? (Rukulíbám) or the poetic story Lilly, the Hang-Glider is Flying! (Lilly, letí rogalo!) by Jaroslav Kovanda (both 2020, Meander), which combines poetry with graphic-novel inserts.

The talented Jakub Bachorík was awarded the Graphic Designer of the Year award in 2016, while he was still studying at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. Bachorík has yet to write his own book, but he and his original artistic style have been involved in a number of titles by other authors. He and Kateřina Přidalová worked together on the popular science book What actually is design? (Co je vlastně design?, 2021, UMPRUM), he illustrated the story of the boy with burns The Boy in the Fire (Kluk v ohni, 2021, Cesta domů, text by Marka Míková) and he left an unmistakable mark on the artistic-educational publications Bridges (Mosty, 2024, Labyrint, text by Magda Garguláková) and A Book Full of Food (Kniha plná jídla, 2025, Host, text by Petra Tajovský Pospěchová).

Prizewinning illustrator, graphic designer and graphic novelist Lucie Lučanská won the Serpa International Award for picture-books in 2023, for title In the Tent (Pod stanem, 2025, Baobab), the poetic hundred-day peregrinations of two siblings in search of adventure. Her dissertation was transformed into The Book of Perceptions (Kniha vnímání, 2022, Lux), which won first place in the Most Beautiful Czech Book of the Year award in 2022, in the Bibliophilia and Book-Objects category.

Fictional worlds for proficient readers

The prerequisites for reader appeal in stories aimed at boys and girls on the edge of adolescence are adventures and tension, often associated with a conundrum (technical, mystical, historical, personal), pacing and thoughtful composition, and also strong characters who do not act stereotypically but overcome various obstacles. Authors who have made their mark in this genre over the relevant decade primarily include Vojtěch Matocha, František Tichý, Marek Toman, Petra Soukupová and Bára Dočkalová, whose books always contain high-quality illustrations.

The latter, Bára Dočkalová, whose novels are published by Labyrint, turns the spotlight on interpersonal relationships: her protagonists are allowed to mature, to become determined to discard their fears about what is expected of them and, first and foremost, to be themselves. Each book takes the readers into another environment and provides them with vividly narrated and engaging stories. The Secret of Pebble Mountain (Tajemství Oblázkové hory, 2018, illustrated by Petra Josefína Stibitzová) is a fantasy novel that takes two supposed enemies into another world; The Battle of the Baseball Diamond (Bitva o diamant, 2022, illustrated by Jindřich Janíček) takes place in the remote American mountains among children who are keen baseball fans, and the most recent, which was awarded the Magnesia Litera prize, Bone (Kost, 2024, illustrated by Zdenka Holub Převrátilová) recalls Slavonic traditions and gives undertones of horror to family history. Interpersonal relationships are the domain of Petra Soukupová, whose books are published by Host. In 2017, she created one fictional world for two separate novels: the detective story Who killed Snowy? (Kdo zabil Snížka?, illustrated by Tereza Ščerbová) is aimed at children, while Best For Everybody (Nejlepší pro všechny, 2018) is an adult drama of relationships. She worked sympathetically with difference, in harmony with the general trends in kidlit of recent years, in her subsequent publications Weird Kids’ Club (Klub divných dětí, 2019) and The Weird Kids and the Sad Cat (Divné děti a smutná kočka, 2023, both illustrated by Nikola Logosová). This is also true of the book Sydney: (The Two of Us from B.) (Sydney: (My dva z B.), 2020, Baobab, illustrated by Juraj Horváth), by publisher Tereza Horváthová, who presents the daily lives of socially marginalised children realistically but with hope. She offers up the same subject to younger readers in the book Wishes (Přání, 2022), illustrated by Michaela Kukovičová. The protagonist of Olga Stehlíková’s book Mojenka (2022, Host, illustrated by Andrea Tachezy) also experiences a challenging social situation – her daily life is destabilised when one of her parents becomes seriously ill. The book’s artwork was awarded a Golden Ribbon in 2023. Incidentally, Stehlíková’s Reference Dictionary (Výkladový slovník, 2023, Host, illustrated by Michaela Casková), a conceptually original work for younger readers, was also crowned with success: the publication won a Golden Ribbon and was selected for inclusion in the international catalogue The White Ravens.

Explorations of space and time

The adventure story genre is competently represented by Marek Toman. His funny, even parodical action books contain literary and cultural puzzles, taking readers to the Wild West in Cross-eyed Jim’s Patisserie (Cukrárna u Šilhavého Jima, 2018, Baobab, illustrated by František Loubat), or to the harsh environment of a pirate ship in The Unreal Adventures of Florentin Flowers (Neskutečná dobrodružství Florentina Flowerse, 2019, illustrated by Magdalena Rutová), or depicting the lives of American emigrants in Nožička and Wohryzek (Nožička a Wohryzek, 2022, illustrated by Jan Trakal). In terms of sales (though theatre and film adaptations have also played their part), the book, or rather books, of the decade is the trilogy Dustzone by Vojtěch Matocha (Dustzone, first volume published in 2018, Paseka, illustrated by Karel Osoha), which updates the tradition exemplified by Jaroslav Foglar in a modern and accessible fashion. The story’s protagonists repeatedly set out for the title’s secret quarter, where technology does not work and where they face real dangers that they must handle without the help of adults. The fictional world of the now-completed trilogy is currently being reimagined as a sort of chronicle in graphic novel format. The series The Chalk Figure (Křídový panáček, collected instalments published in 2023, illustrated by Karel Osoha) won the Muriel prize and was followed by Weird Walks (Podivné procházky, from March 2023, illustrated by Ester Kuchynková, Kateřina Čupová).

Books about travelling into the past enjoy using literary load-bearing strategies in which the child heroes find themselves with no modern technology and unable to turn to their families for help. Gateways to the past come in many different forms – the protagonist of Lucie Paulová’s novel Alma and the Picture World (Alma a Svět obrazu, 2022, Paseka, illustrated by Kateřina Čupová) goes through a picture to the age of the First Republic; the twins in Petra Hůlová’s Foxy Eyes (Liščí oči, 2021, Argo, illustrated by Nikkarin) arrive in August 1968 through a hole in the bathroom floor and Martin Čepa’s trio of heroes are transported through a large stone bell to the last days of World War II in The Bell (Zvon, 2024, Argo, illustrated by Richard Fischer). The children are in familiar places, but under unfamiliar conditions, and they have to rely on each other to get back home.

Otherwise, Stanislav Beran also works with a portal to the past in the novel Lost in the Air (Ztracený v povětří, 2023, Host; the sequel, Fear Over the River (Strach nad řekou) was published in 2024, both illustrated by Ján Kurinec). His protagonist passes through a metal cabinet into different eras in time, but the core of the plot unfolds in the present. The child’s experience is thus not only gained while travelling into the past, but also corresponds to the memory of adult characters.

The notional literary peak of historically motivated fiction belongs indisputably to František Tichý and the first two volumes of his free trilogy, Transport Beyond Eternity (Transport za věčnost, 2017, Baobab, Magnesia Litera) and The Labyrinth of Unfinished Encounters (Labyrint nedokončených setkání, 2020, Baobab, all illustrated by Stanislav Setinský), inspired by family correspondence and other authentic documents reflecting the lives of children and adolescents under the Protectorate. The trilogy is completed by the dystopian science-fiction story Recruit 2044 (Rekrut 2044, 2022), which is set in the near future. These sublimely well-composed, multi-layered novels combine strong adolescent characters with questions of personal responsibility and integrity.

Martin Vopěnka has continued to publish science fiction for children and young people over the last decade; his wide-ranging novel The New Planet (Nová planeta, 2015, Mladá fronta) won a Golden Ribbon. The books of Václav Dvořák are also exceptionally popular with readers. His most famous titles of the period include his self-published series The Kids from the Planet Písečnice (Písečníci, 2018, 2022) and the standalone novel I, Finis (Já, Finis, 2020, all illustrated by Jakub Cenkl). The artwork in the book Já, Finis – a readable science fiction story about boys who disappear on their eighth birthdays – was awarded a Golden Ribbon, and the text was awarded the “Readers’ Kosmas Prize”, which is part of the Magnesia Litera.

Graphic novels as the supreme storytelling format

The graphic novel scene has also professionalised over the last decade; this was reflected in the foundation of the Czech Graphic Novel Academy in 2018. The Academy is now responsible for awarding the annual Muriel prize for graphic novels, which of course includes a children’s graphic novel category. A strong generation of graphic novel creators is making strides in publishing graphic novels for both children and adults. The trends in these spheres are similar to a certain extent, resulting in an overlap in the target groups. For example, history-themed graphic novels may appeal to pre-teens, teens and adults. The graphic novel is thus establishing itself as the supreme storytelling format in the Czech context too; a format that enables the communication of complex themes directly and comprehensibly using strong visual elements.

The number, quality and variety of genres covered by original Czech graphic novels continues to grow and doubtless as a result we have in recent years detected a blurring of the boundary between the graphic novel and the illustrated book. Authors who combine artistic techniques (Renáta Fučíková for example, in the book Chekhov & (Čechov &) uses graphic novel elements to retell the stories of individual plays), and illustrators of prose (Klára Smolíková and Kateřina Illnerová: Dalila and the Lift with No Doors, Dalila a výtah bez dveří 2024) and educational books (Ester Stará and Milan Starý: The Book of Feelings, Kniha pocitů 2022) are exploiting the potential of graphic novels as a vivid interpretational tool. The Alliance of the Valiant by Ester Stará and Jiří Franta (Aliance udatných, 2024, 65. pole) combines text and graphic-novel passages in equal measure and is aimed at readers aged approximately ten and over. The point is not only to add interest. The division also functions from the story’s perspective – the graphic-novel sequences depict the alternative reality of a video game into which the main hero regularly falls when struggling with problems of ordinary life (family relationships, bullying).

Stable positions and new blood

The Brno-based painter and illustrator Pavel Čech, a fixture in the Czech graphic-novel scene, is primarily famous for his fondness for watercolours, ink and pastels. He continues to publish the graphic-novel cycle The Adventures of the Speedy Squirrel (Dobrodružství rychlé Veverky) – the most recent part was published in 2023 and parts 1-5 came out in a collected edition in the same year – and he also delighted fans of Jaroslav Foglar with his graphic-novel story The Redhead (O Červenáčkovi, 2019). The wordless graphic novel And (A, 2016, Petrkov) represents a new departure in his work. This parable about the mechanisms of autocracy was awarded the Muriel prize and a Golden Ribbon.

However, many new individuals have also emerged from the graphic-novel scene of the last decade. One of the best creators is Michal Menšík, who publishes under the pseudonym Nikkarin. In recent years he has also devoted himself to illustrating Czech and translated books, including Foxy Eyes by Petra Hůlová (Liščí oči, 2021, Argo), and Kiki’s Delivery Service (Doručovací služba čarodějky Kiki, 2024, Albatros) by the Japanese writer Eiko Kadono; however, he made his début as a screenwriter and cartoonist in one, as long as fifteen years ago, with a graphic-novel fantasy series (from 2009, Labyrint). He received a Golden Ribbon for the humorous graphic-novel fantasy for young adults Super Spellsword Saga: The Legend of Infinity (Super Spellsword Sága: Legenda o Nekonečnu, 2019, Labyrint) and he also contributes ongoing comic strips to the children’s magazines Four-Leaved Clover (Čtyřlístek) and Rocket (Raketa). Some of his well-loved stories also waited some time for a collected edition in book form: Hubert & Hugo (from 2021, Labyrint, three volumes, of which the most recent won the Muriel prize in 2024) follows the fortunes of two climbers, a father and son, while The Adventures of Rocky and Teri (Dobrodružství Rockyho & Terky), issued collectively with a bonus about the alien trio Uno, Duo, Tria (2022) describes expeditions in a spaceship and more.

Other successful series originally published in magazines and reissued several years later in book form include Matylda and the Pink Wolf by Jana Šrámková and Petra Josefína Stibitzová (Matylda a Růžovej vlk, 2023, Labyrint, Muriel prize) or Guinea Pigs in Action by Klára Smolíková and Ester Kuchynková (Morčata v akci, 2022, Crew), which originally appeared in the magazine Tečka [Full Stop].

Superheroes and robots

Kateřina Čupová made her début on the one hundredth anniversary of Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. with a large-format graphic-novel adaptation (2020, Argo), which has attracted international attention. She has also won success at home with her subsequent book, the inventive Cook, Little Pot, Cook! (Hrnečku, vař!, 2022, Argo, Muriel prize 2022), which endows traditional fairytale characters with superhero elements.

In the graphic novel Supro: Heroes on Credit (Supro: Hrdinové na dluh, 2023, Crew), life is breathed into other superheroes by screenwriter Štěpánka Jislová, one of the most distinctive Czech graphic-novel artists of recent times. Her work for adult audiences Bald (2024, Graphic Mundi; Bez vlasů, 2020, Paseka) and Heartcore (2025, Graphic Mundi; Srdcovka, 2023, Paseka) has been highly successful, but she has also applied her ideas and playfulness in a graphic-novel guide to Czech sayings called Sayings and Proverbs (Přeřekadla, 2021, Meander). As an artist, Jislová has also contributed to historical graphic novels, aimed at a broad spectrum of readers, that raise awareness of Czechoslovak history – this includes, in addition to Milada Horáková by Jislová and Zdeněk Ležák (2020, Argo) Tricolore by Martin Šinkovský (Trikolora, 2019, Albatros) or Štefánik by Gabriela Kyselová and Michal Baláž (2021, Labyrint).

The trilogy William and Meriwether (William a Meriwether, Labyrint) by screenwriter Taťána Rubášová and artist Jindřich Janíček represents dystopia and science fiction for young people in Czech graphic novels. In The Remarkable Robot Expedition (Podivuhodná robotí expedice, 2016), which was included in The White Ravens selection, two robots travel around the one-time United States and find the remnants of human presence there. The sequels The Unexpected Robot Exodus (Neočekávaný robotí exodus, 2019) and The Distressing Robot Existence (Strastiplná robotí existence, 2023), expand into existential themes associated with human civilisation, ecology and ethics. The trilogy is enlivened with balanced humour and the emphasis gradually shifts to searching for your own place in the world and the basis of friendship. Jindřich Janíček’s creative approach successfully updates the adventure genre with a combination of interwar tradition and modern visual simplicity (small wonder that he was named Illustrator of the Year in 2022 by the Czech Grand Design awards). This approach functions convincingly both in his graphic novels aimed primarily at an adult audience, such as R for Runner (B jako běžec, 2021, Paseka), To the West on the Northwest Line (Na západ severozápadní linkou, 2022, Paseka) and in his illustrations to domestic and translated titles, such as Bára Dočkalová’s The Battle of the Baseball Diamond (Bitva o diamant, 2022, Labyrint).

A good example of a successful collaboration between a talented artist and experienced writer is the entertaining graphic novel Tibbles the Cat (Tibbles, 2021, Meander, Muriel prize 2021) by David Dolenský and Michal Šanda. A subtle ecological point is the punchline to this story of a cat (anti)hero, who moves to an island with his owner, where they discover a new bird species. Before any ornithologist manages to visit the island, however, the tomcat has wiped them all out. Let us add that Dolenský’s other (non-graphic) novels also deal with consideration for and relationships with the natural world, including his début Rufus the Woodsman (Rufus zálesák, 2020, Baobab) and the loose continuation of this wiry, idiosyncratic man’s story, Rufus the Fisherman (Rufus rybaří, 2023, Baobab, text by Jaroslav Tvrdoň).

Playful poetry and wordplay

The tradition of rhyming poetry for children is currently being nurtured primarily by Robin Král, Radek Malý and Ester Stará. Child readers can encounter the poet, translator and songwriter Robin Král’s playful poems in nearly four dozen books, predominantly concertina books. His most striking poetic achievements are associated with the publishing house Běžíliška, where he started his successful poetry career with the 3D concertina book Oh, Ferdinand! about bat friends, illustrated by Andrea Tachezy (Ferdinande!, 2013, Golden Ribbon for the artwork, IBBY Honour List). He won the Magnesia Litera and a Golden Ribbon for his collection The Inventionary (Vynálezárium, 2015, illustrated by Jana Hrušková), in which he playfully brings together the world of inventors and literary theory (selected poetic forms such as calligrams, rondels and rispetti describing 53 human inventors). His other successful titles include A Cat in Cross-Section (Řez kočkou, 2018 and 2024, illustrated by Tereza Vostradovská), the narrative encyclopaedia Beware, A Doctor! (Pozor doktor!, 2018, illustrated by Nikola Logosová), the celebratory poetic composition Long Live the Queen! (Ať žije královna!, 2024, Knižní stezka k dětem, illustrated by Barbora Burianová) or the concertina books published by Meander, of which we will name only the most wide-ranging – a uniquely artistic treatment in the pop-up book At the Fair (Na pouti, 2024, Meander, illustrated by Andrea Tachezy).

The poet and German translator Radek Malý also writes poetry for children published by Běžíliška, often in a Mikroliška edition for the smallest readers and then, for example, the concertina book Nine Dormice in a Den (Devět plchů v pelechu, 2016) or the picture book Losses and Finds (Ztráty a nálezy, 2024), both illustrated by Andrea Tachezy, or by Meander, e.g. concertina books and reprints of the successful titles To Where Laughter is Allowed in (Kam až smí smích, 2009 and 2015), or The Children’s Little Poetic Dictionary in Examples (Poetický slovníček dětem v příkladech, 2012 and 2023) or indeed by Albatros, including All Sorts of Banter for Boys and Girls (Všelijaké řečičky pro kluky a holčičky, 2017, illustrated by Alžběta Skálová), Postcards from Unnoticed Towns (Pohlednice z nespatřených měst, 2022, illustrated by Jan Laštovička), where, however, he has in recent years mostly made a name for himself with educational titles: An Atlas of Extinct Animals (Atlas vyhubených živočichů, 2019), An Atlas of Endangered Animals (Atlas ohrožených živočichů, 2020), An Atlas of Prehistoric Animals (Atlas prehistorických živočichů, 2024).

The playful poems of Ester Stará, an experienced and award-winning kidlit author, will entertain and inform in the best sense of the word. She writes verses with funny, rhymed punchlines for schoolchildren Onions Make Everyone Cry (Každý bulí nad cibulí, 2017, Paseka), but also about means of transport and animals for the smallest readers: such as the hand-made art books by publisher POP-PAP Let’s Goooooooo! (Jedéééém!, 2018), Baa Moo Oink! (Meky mek! 2022) and Elle the Inquizzzative Bee (O zzzvědavé včele Elle, 2024). Stará, an experienced special educational needs teacher and speech therapist, is also the author of a number of didactic publications and books of fairytales that help to develop reading and communication skills, including The Greatest Wish (Největší přání, 2017, 65. pole) and Smoky and Beanie (Šedík a Bubi, 2019, Pikola, included in The White Ravens selection).

Perceiving the sense and nonsense of the world around us

The poet Petr Borkovec turns his attention onto the transience, fragility and ordinariness of things in his concertina books titled Things in Our Lives (Věci našeho života, 2017, Cesta domů, illustrated by Adriana Skálová) and Things We Lose (Věci, které ztrácíme, 2020, 2023, Meander, illustrated by Petra Josefína Stibitzová). The “herbarium of dreams” Blue Agave (Modrá agave, 2021, Baobab) that accompanies artist Michaela Kukovičová’s picture album is dedicated to “secretive beings aged 12 to 18”. In 2024, publisher Běžíliška brought out a collected edition of Borkovec’s poetry with the title Wet Blue Wellies are a Kingfisher (Ledňáček jsou modré mokré holínky, 2024), comprising the volumes Everything is in the Garden (Všechno je to na zahradě, 2013), What They Dream About (O čem sní, 2016) and the best-of collection Each Thing has Something in Common with Happiness (Každá věc má něco společného se štěstím, 2019) plus the newly published composition Benjamin Murka.

Daniela Fischerová’s most recent nonsense poetry includes the collections Tattooed Aunty (Tetovaná teta, 2015, Meander, illustrated by Jaromír Plachý) and The Sea Cow with a Ukelele (Ochechule s ukulele, 2018, illustrated by Jakub Kouřil), and humorously reflects children’s experience with the modern world and the world of fairytales. The charming onomatopoeic rhymes and wordplay of this author, who writes for both children and adults, can also be found in several volumes in the Repolelo series, published from 2019 by Meander Crash! Bang! Wallop! (Plác! Tác! Bác!), The Unprecedented Spectacle (Nevídaná podívaná), The Flying Tram (Tramvaj letí) and Nine Aunties on a Day Out (Devět tet jde na výlet).Today this remarkable series numbers six dozen titles and is particularly distinctive in creative terms because it brings together young artistic talent (Jakub Bachorík, Anna Kulíčková) and established Czech poets (Ivan Wernisch, Michal Šanda, Ivan Binar, Robin Král). Several volumes present innovatively illustrated folk riddles or sayings: Folk Dance Tra La La by Ester Nemjó (Kalamajka mik mik mik, 2019, Meander), What’s That? by Zuzana Čupová (Co to?, 2024, Meander); others have no text whatsoever, such as Hubert is Angry (Hubert se vzteká, 2021, Meander) or Karla is Crying (Karla pláče, 2021, Meander) by Nikola Hoření, Our Little Pig (Naše prasátko, 2020, Meander) by Jaromír Plachý, but there are also books where the same person is both writer and artist (Tereza Marianová). The bilingual Romanes-Czech fairytale Boiled Eggs (Vařená vejce – Tade jandre, 2024, co-published with Kher, illustrated by Zuzana Mašková) is an outstanding achievement, telling the story of a Roma boy who outwits a lazy farmer.

We could name yet more remarkable titles; however, an overview article cannot do justice to the subject. Our aim was, first and foremost, to highlight the breadth and variety available and also to mention the international reception and success (The White Ravens, IBBY, Bologna Children’s Book Fair) of specific books, which only confirms that Czech creators have plenty to offer to a foreign audience, primarily because they respond with sensitivity and originality to the world in which today’s children are growing up, yet consciously work with the strong traditions underpinning Czech kidlit. Alongside the established literary greats, a significant younger generation is gaining ground with readers and, as a result, the shared literary space is becoming ever more varied in terms of authors, language, genre and themes.

When I was in charge of the MF DNES Brno regional supplement, I tried to apply the same criteria of journalistic relevance to culture as I did to other fields of human activity. This resulted in animosity from those cultural circles whose space was thus confined, and words of praise from those who did not wish those circles well. Quite often it was the other way round the following week.

I began writing poetry in a notebook that I gave girls to read. I didn’t get into samizdat, because I didn’t know the pubs that the samizdat writers went to. And instead of Prague I went down to the Oslava with my haversack. Then came the Velvet Revolution and I started giving vent to my journalistic ambitions by hawking a student newspaper. When it actually published my topical poem on Ivan Blatný’s death, I was happy and thought I couldn’t get any further with literature. I only recently rediscovered that newspaper and the poem.

When they told us at the Lidové noviny Brno editorial office in the mid 1990s that they were going to fire us in six months’ time for organizational reasons (which was by no means such a routine affair as it is these days), a few of us colleagues remembered that we were still poets. In those days before we wrote poetry in Brno we fondled stones from Vysočina and sniffed Kunštát clay beneath a crucifix, so we didn’t even take our poems to a publisher and we set up Almanach Vítrholc, where we published them. A friend printed them out and we started to go around the pubs and clubs to read them out, which we still do to this day.

We published several almanachs and invited hordes of girls to our events. Our reputation in Brno got to such a level that two friends who had worked their way up from theatre cloakroom attendants to theatrical publishers offered to publish my collection. I called it Zapalte Prahu (Set Prague on Fire) and included my poem Mrdat sekretářky (Fuck Secretaries). Regional acclaim was guaranteed. A literary critic who had worked his way up to be mayor wrote that I did it well and I’m interesting. I thought I couldn’t get any further with literature. Nobody from Host, Petrov and the neighbouring cafes was talking to me yet.

These people only started talking to me after I started to meet up with them early in the morning at a particular Brno pub called Poslední leč. When they found out that under the right climatic conditions what they told me over a beer could have an effect on the local supplement of the most prestigious daily, I became a part of the cultural scene.

Since that time nine Vítrholc Almanachs have come out as well as five of my own collections. I am so well established on the literary scene that not a single review has come out on the last one in the eleven months since it was published. Only Ivan Wernisch has possibly managed anything like that so far.

As I have felt rather down on the literary scene for quite some time now and I feel all on my own, in February 2014 I set up and started to run a website called Nedělní chvilka poezie (Sunday Poetry Time), where every Sunday at 8 pm I publish texts by a particular poet. I do enjoy this work, I like it and five minutes before I die I’d like to received a medal for it for my contribution to the development of literature in our region. I very much look forward to working for CzechLit. As I am writing this column, I am saying to myself that I cannot get any further with this literature. And I would just like to add that I have never asked for a literary grant.