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A classic work of twentieth-century Slovak literature that blends naturalism and depictions of rural life with the supernatural.

After many years, Libor returns to his native village, where he has been appointed gamekeeper. His childhood sweetheart, Zuna, is waiting for him there. But his homecoming is far from idyllic. He has “tasted city life” and soon becomes an outsider to the villagers. According to them, Zuna has become a local prostitute who sleeps with anyone who pays her. Zuna’s father, an old miller, has gone blind because he made a pact with the devil. The mill where Libor and Zuna used to play as children has fallen into disrepair and ruin. The more Libor gets to know the world that he has returned to, the more confused he becomes. The village is full of superstitions, secrets, and hostility. He meets the charcoal burner Tavo, who lives high in the mountains, and learns from him the mysterious and bloody story of Zuna’s birth. He also learns what matters most to him: Zuna is pure and innocent. Libor starts a relationship with her from scratch. But just when their forgotten love might finally come to fruition, He appears—a vagabond who can transform into a wolf—and Libor discovers that Zuna is meeting with him. Is it a monster that gouges people’s eyes out? The devil, or our immaterial, dark alter ego? Reality, dreams, and fantasy blend in Libor’s mind as his hopes seem crushed beyond redemption.

Stories that entwine the mundane with the mystical, written by a cult favorite Slovakian writer.

An unhappily married woman is impregnated by her elderly neighbor who lives in a building across the street and with whom she has never had any physical contact. Just as his attention creates life within her, his own life waxes and wanes with her gaze and attention.

A man finds himself trapped in a pub on a sweltering afternoon after refusing to buy a beer with his cigarettes. Guarded by a vigilante bartender and his beer-obsessed patrons, his every attempt at escape is foiled until their life-giving elixir, the beer, runs out.

This collection introduces English-language readers to the work of Dušan Mitana, a cult figure in contemporary Central European literature. In Mitana’s stories, appearing in English for the first time, the rational and the irrational are indistinguishable. His tales infect a banal, quotidian realism with mystical and supernatural distortions. Tinged with Hitchcockian paranoia and full of unexpected turns, the seventeen stories collected here offer a glimpse into Mitana’s trademark absurdist style.

A glimpse into the world of young people, modern nomads, roving in search of a new and promising life.

The Moon in Foil traces the stories of Petra, Natália, Anka, Mika, Juliana, and Jackie as they go out into the world in search of a better life—or maybe just a different one. In post-communist Europe, they have the freedom to study and work in places their parents couldn’t even have visited—Paris, London, Helsinki, and Budapest. But the reality of that “freedom,” they soon discover, is often nothing more than tedious work and poor living conditions. From close looks at the work of a housekeeper at a French hotel, a bartender at an Irish pub, a snowboarding instructor in Slovakia in the winter and an office worker in London in the summer, and a programmer in Helsinki, to explorations of larger topics such as marriage, divorce, and relationships, Zuska Kepplová’s novel is a millennials’ odyssey—a search for the self by the post–Cold War generation.

Set in Slovakia, a revealing narrative about contemporary society.

An accidental pregnancy, a good-looking man who cares about no one but himself, marriage because the man “had a bit of a Christian upbringing,” divorce—that is the trajectory of Pipina’s life, leading to single motherhood and a thousand cruelties of everyday life because she is an ugly woman in a world where ugliness is worse than a death sentence. At every turn, she is reminded of her inferiority. She can’t wait for the end of each day when she can sit in the stairwell outside of her dilapidated apartment and retreat into her thoughts. Her drab life full of indignities dissolves only in her beautiful, cinematic dreams. In them, she experiences whatever she can’t do or have in real life. She creates a rich inner world, and her razor-sharp observations, interlaced with a good dose of humor, produce a revealing narrative about contemporary society. In the first English translation of her work, the brilliant Slovak author Zuzana Cigánová pulls back the veil on people’s most private thoughts—thoughts that could very much be our own.