Everyday Spooks (Modern Czech Classics) - Hardcover

Michal, Karel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 8024614944 ISBN 13: 9788024614946

Publisher: Karolinum Press, Charles University, 2008

Synopsis

Prague-born Karel Michal (1932–84) lived a significant part of his adult life under Czechoslovakia’s oppressive communist regime. Prevented from studying at the university as a young man, he fruitlessly cycled through a number of professions before finally turning to writing in the early 1960s. Michal’s works—which include detective fiction, historical novels, short stories, and screenplays—offer a Kafkaesque perspective on the mechanism of the absurd and argue for substantial reinterpretation of the concept of ordinary life under a totalitarian regime.
            With Everyday Spooks, Michal presents an unforgettable assortment of fantastic creatures that inhabit his strange vision of everyday reality in ’50s and ’60s communist Czechoslovakia. Translated from the Czech by David Short and complemented with suitably eerie illustrations by Dagmar Hamsíková, this collection of seven short stories describes bizarre encounters where the past melts into the present, ordinary people meet comic and anxious figures and interact with ghosts, and mundane speech drifts repeatedly into absurdity.  

About this title

About the Author

A retired teacher of Czech and Slovak, David Short has increasingly worked as a translator. He is the author of a popular Czech textbook, coauthor of a number of publications in the field of linguistics, and the translator of a score or so of books from Czech.

About this edition

• Publisher: Karolinum Press, Charles University
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 8024614944
• ISBN 13: 9788024614946
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 226