Rajendra Chitnis

Originally published in 1925, Plowshares into Swords is an expressionist antiwar novel in which Vladislav Vancura tells the story of the denizens of the Ouhrov estate in language as baroque as the manor that ties them all together. The fragmented narrative introduces the reader to such characters as Baron Danowitz, his sons, his French concubine, the farmhand František Hora, and the mentally disabled murderer Reka in the autumn of 1913, before revealing their fates during World War I. Ranging from the peaceful farmlands of Bohemia to the battlefields of Galicia, taking in the pubs of Budapest and the hospitals of Krakow, the novel constitutes an unsentimental and naturalistic approach to the war that created Czechoslovakia. Plowshares into Swords is a stunning novel by one of Czech literature’s most important writers. This modernist masterpiece, reminiscent of the work of Isaac Babel and William Faulkner, is now available in English for the very first time.

Translated by David Short Foreword by Rajendra Chitins Burying the Season is an affectionate, multi-layered account of small town life in central Europe beginning in the early 1930s and ending in the 21st Century. Adapting scenes from Fellini’s Amarcord, Bajaja’s meandering narrative weaves humour, tragedy and historical events into a series of compelling nostalgic anecdotes. The ex-King of Bulgaria, a future president with the unfortunate name Goose, strange visitors and eccentric locals are just a few of the peculiar, but very human, characters drawn by the author experiencing the wonder and disillusionment of their everyday lives. Zlín, Bajaja’s hometown, with its Bauhaus inspired architecture, built by its major employer Bata Shoes, feature prominently. Friends and family walk, skate, swim, quarrel, love and fall into the local river Drevnice; disappearing and re-appearing, surviving changing times while their children play Swallows and Amazons. As an essay in remembering, it offers hope.

Prague, I see a city...is a novel of quest, in which the heroine abandons the material world of everyday society and linear history, perceiving it as false, temporary and distracting, and journeys in search of her true identity. Suffused with the atmosphere immediately following the end of the Communist regime, Hodrova's novel is a conscious addition to the tradition of Prague literary texts by, for example, Karel Hynek Macha, Jakub Arbes, Gustav Meyrink, and Franz Kafka, who present the city as a hostile living creature, or as a labyrinthine place of magic and mystery, in which the individual human being may easily get lost. Translated by David Short.