Karel Hruška Books

This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he himself thought worthy of publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; Meditation, a collection of his earlier studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America and a fascinating occasional piece, and The Aeroplanes at Brescia, Kafka's eyewitness account of an air display in 1909. Together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.

Two short stories address Prague's relationship to Western Europe, particularly Germany, and the distemper of Europe at the turn of the century

The Czech author Božena Němcová (1820-1862), born in Vienna, paints an entirely unsentimental portrait of the country habits and customs of Bohemia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and depicts the people she encountered during her childhood: teachers, maids, farm workers, millers, foresters, priests, to name but a few. The central character of this story, set in Eastern Bohemia, is a grandmother, full of simple wisdom, goodness and love, who personifies an ideal of maternal care. The Prošek family live in this country idyll but their father’s work means that he is compelled to spend a large part of the year in the imperial city of Vienna. Thus, their grandmother is brought home to look after the children and the property. This is the background against which the author unfolds the most important prose work in Czech literature and creates “one of the best female characters in world literature”.

This is a collection of Neruda's funny, wry, biter-sweet and illuminating stories about life for the inhabitants of the Old Quarter of 19th-century Prague.

contains 19 fairytales translated from German

„Alles, was über dieses Buch gesagt werden kann, ist nur tastendes Nebenher. Man muß es selbst nachlesen, Zeile für Zeile, wie hier aus einem oft lieblichen Zusammensein von Ironie und Pietät die drohende Strenge des letztes Gerichts auftaucht. Mit diesem Buch nun wächst er vollends in die Nähe großer, zeitlos-prophetischer Kunst, eines Dante, eines Hölderlin. Was einer stammelnden Generation versagt blieb, woran sie sich ekstatisch verblutete: in diesen Fragmenten tritt es als künstlerische Vollendung in unsere Tage.“ Hans Sahl, in: Das Tagebuch (Januar 1927) „… so entsteht dieselbe Atmosphäre des Grauens und der Qual, die im Prozeß (grauenhafter, spukhafter) zu spüren war. Fragt man mich aber, welches der beiden Werke , schöner‘ ist, so muß ich bekennen: das Schloß. Denn in diesem Werk ist der große Erzähler Franz Kafka der Märchendichter, den seine kleineren früheren Werke ahnen ließen. Es gibt zauberhafte Seiten in diesem Märchen-Roman, seltsam humoristische Seiten, die ein Grauen und ein Lachen zugleich im Leser erwecken.“ Ludwig Winder, in: Bohemia (Januar 1927)

On his thirtieth birthday, the bank clerk Josef K. is suddenly arrested by mysterious agents for an unspecified crime. He is told that he will be set free, but must make regular appearances at a court in the attic of a tenement building while his trial proceeds. Although he never comes to know the particulars of his case, Josef K. finds his life taken over by the opaque bureaucratic procedures and is tormented by the psychological pressures exerted by his legal nightmare. Published the year after the author's death, but written ten years earlier, The Trial is the most acclaimed of Kafka's three novels, and is both a haunting meditation on freedom and the powerlessness of the individual in the face of state power, and an ominous prefiguration of the totalitarian excesses of the twentieth century.