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The first English translation of Josef Capek’s classic novella explores what happens when a single violent act changes everything.

Two young poachers are caught by a gamekeeper and, in a moment of panic, shoot him. What began as a reckless adventure in pursuit of a deer becomes a desperate and increasingly hopeless flight through the forest. 

Shadow of the Holly-Fern stands among the finest literary achievements of Josef Capek, the Czech painter and illustrator who died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945 for his democratic convictions. The balladic novella is distinguished by its powerful portrayal of the fugitives’ inner lives; initially intoxicated by the beauty of the forest and a sense of freedom, they gradually succumb to mounting despair. Its intense focus on guilt and conscience recalls Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, while its language remains intensely lyrical and evocative. First published in 1930, the book remains one of the enduring masterpieces of Czech literature and is presented here in English for the first time in a lucid translation by Geoffrey Chew.

A new translation of Egon Bondy’s classic critique and parody of Communist Czechoslovakia.

Bondy's merry utopia, or rather anti-utopia, was written during the bleakest years of “normalization” in Communist Czechoslovakia during the 1970s. Once considered a cult novel of the Czech underground, Unsound Siblings is not only a celebration of the “alternative way of life” of people living deliberately outside of (Communist) state power and a mockery of the contemporary consumerist ideas of the police state, but also a light parody of science fiction, organically incorporating philosophical themes. As much as this work can also be described as “adventure literature,” evoking, for example, the scenery of a “mysterious island,” its overall message reaches the power of a religious, gospel message that it is, despite all odds, possible to live in this world after all. Unsound Siblings, first published in Czech by the exiled 68 Publishers in Toronto and circulated in samizdat copies in Czechoslovakia, later won the Egon Hostovský Prize.