Angel Station (Paperback or Softback)

Jachym Topol is the most-translated Czech author of his generation, lauded for his imaginative storytelling and his inventive use of language. Melding fiction and documentary, with a dash of black humor on the side, he zeroes in on the agonies and injustices of the totalitarian past, in his own country and throughout Central and Eastern Europe.

Angel Station takes its title from the bustling Metro stop in the Prague district of Smíchov. Until the gentrification of the late 1990s, it was a rough-and-tumble, working-class neighborhood with a sizeable Roma and Vietnamese population. Topol’s novel, in sparse yet poetic language―agilely brought into English by the author’s longtime translator Alex Zucker―weaves together the brutal and disturbing fates of an addict, a shopkeeper, and a religious fanatic as they each follow the path they hope will lead them to serenity: drugs, money, and faith.

Jáchym Topol is the author of novels, poetry, stories, dramas, screenplays, reportage, and song lyrics. His novel The Devil’s Workshop won an English PEN Award for Writing in Translation and was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Best Translated Book Award (Fiction). His novel City Sister Silver was featured in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. He is the winner of the Vilenica International Literary Prize (Slovenia), and two of the most prestigious Czech literary awards, the Tom Stoppard Prize and the Jaroslav Seifert Prize.

Alex Zucker’s translations include three previous books by Jáchym Topol―The Devil’s Workshop, City Sister Silver, and A Trip to the Train Station―as well as novels by Tomáš Zmeškal, Magdaléna Platzová, Josef Jedlička, Heda Margolius Kovály, Petra Hůlová, Patrik Ouředník, and Miloslava Holubová. From 2014 to 2016, he served as cochair of the PEN America Translation Committee. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.