Twisted Spoon Press: 25 books

Klíma's intense inner life and complex mental state are reflected in his peculiar writings. His eccentricity of style and often volatile prose were intended to convey the deep conflicts attending his thought processes, and this is perhaps best exemplified in the novella Glorious Nemesis. Set in the...

A village in the Carpathian Mountains, one of the last outposts of pre-modernity, an elderly man, sensing his time is short, tells his young grandchildren tales that weave a family saga covering the real history from the 1870s to the time of the telling. One of the children, now grown, is the re-teller...

A Gothic Soul is the most acclaimed work of Czech Decadent prose. Expressing concerns that are unique to the Czech movement while alluding creatively and ironically to Joris-Karl Huysman's Against Nature, the novella is set in Prague, which is portrayed as a dead city, a city peopled by shades, who,...

A communal apartment in late Soviet-era Moscow. An elderly tenant — the daughter of the apartment's original owner — has disappeared after seeing a ghost. Over the course of a weekend the other occupants meet in the kitchen to argue over who is more deserving of the room she has apparently vacated....

Set in the mythical Polish village of Primeval, a microcosm of the world populated by eccentric, archetypal characters and guarded by four archangels, the novel chronicles the lives of the inhabitants over the course of the feral 20th century in prose that is forceful, direct, and the stylistic cousin...

I, City is a novel about the city of Most in north Bohemia, an ancient city founded on a primeval wetland that was literally "relocated" to get to the brown coal beneath it. The city is the narrator, telling its own story through its inhabitants, who make their "appearances" in...

Boys & Murderers is the first collection of novellas and stories in English translation from Hermann Ungar, author of the highly-acclaimed novel The Maimed. A writer of unique talent whose life was prematurely ended by illness, he was much admired by Thomas Mann, who prefaces this volume, and...

Medieval Bohemia, the petty nobility nothing more than highwaymen, literally robber barons, and the king has to dispatch troops to restore order. Marketa Lazarová was promised to God at birth, destined to live her life in a convent, but she is abducted by one of the neighboring Kozlík clan and discovers...

The remarkable debut novel from Marek Šindelka, already the recipient of his country's major literary awards for poetry (Jiří Orten Prize) and prose (Magnesia Litera), Aberrant is a multifaceted work that mixes and mashes together a variety of genres and styles to create a heady concoction of crime...

Written in 1935 at the height of Czech Surrealism but not published until 1945, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a bizarre erotic fantasy of a young girl's maturation into womanhood on the night of her first menstruation. Referencing Matthew Lewis's The Monk, Marquis de Sade's Justine, K. H. Macha's...

Tomaž Šalamun was one of the most influential and prolific poets in Central Europe over the past few decades. Thanks to the translation of his work, he also received wide international acclaim. A number of volumes of his poetry have been published in English, yet A Ballad for Metka Krašovec, originally...