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A unique blend of fiction and biography that explores the fascinating life of early-twentieth-century Czech photographer František Drtikol.

Have you ever wondered what a story written by a beam of light would be like? The story would be ordinary, but the course of events extraordinary.  Its hero would be a photographer, a guardian of light. And, naturally, the tale would be full of shadow.
 
A History of Light delves into the fascinating life of František Drtikol (1883–1961), an important figure in early-twentieth-century photography who is all but forgotten in contemporary times. A dandy from a small mining town, a world-famous photographer whose business went bankrupt, a master of the nude who never had much luck with women, a mystic and a Buddhist who believed in communism—a man whose numerous contradictions were evident externally and synthesized internally.

A unique blend of fiction and biography, this novel vividly portrays Drtikol’s life, tracing the diverse stages of his career and offering detailed, almost encyclopedic insights into the times and places pivotal to his journey. Acclaimed Czech author Jan Němec narrates the story in the uncommon second-person singular, speaking directly to his subject. Fresco-like, this novel is an artistic and spiritual Bildungsroman that covers over half a century, bringing to life the silver mines of Príbram, Jugendstil Munich, and the Bohemianism of the First Czechoslovak Republic. Drtikol’s role as a photographer is set against the turbulent history of Central Europe through the two World Wars, and the events of those five decades form a riveting backdrop for an exploration of the artist’s work.

Written in the first four months of the war in Ukraine, fueled by anger towards mindless violence, Nemec’s stories tackle the present moment and confront what really matters at times of abundant destruction.

A Czech man in Ukraine in search of his alter ego. A gang of homeless kids driven from a cellar by tenants using it as a shelter from the war. A German couple who ‘rented a womb’ in Ukraine, whose child is now stuck in Kyiv. A teenager partnered with a Valkyrie for the distribution of lavash in besieged Mariupol delays his flight until it is too late. A Russian academic mounting a protest in the center of Moscow dressed in a costume from Swan Lake. They may not be soldiers at the front, but for the characters in these stories, life will never again be as it was before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In this collection of short stories—two set in Ukraine, two in the West, and one in Russia—Czech author Jan Nemec has produced a work of remarkable immediacy.

The first English-language translation of a classic Czech antiwar novel written in the wake of WWI.
 
Originally published in 1925, Ploughshares into Swords is an expressionist antiwar novel in which Vladislav Vančura 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 Řeka 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. Ploughshares 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.
 

Ladislav Grosman's powerful story of a twelve-year-old Jewish boy in wartime Slovakia smuggled into Hungary to escape deportation. 

In The Devil's Own Luck, readers experience the horrors of war and the Holocaust through the lens of the young boy's obsessive reading of pulp fiction, imposing a layer of adventure on the bleak landscape of his experience. This simultaneously tragic, humorous, and poetic novel by Ladislav Grosman was published posthumously.

With their courageous and engaging critique of Communism in the 1950s, these critically acclaimed Slovak classics demask one of the founding myths of modern Slovakia.

The Hours and The Minutes was first published in Bratislava in 1956, the year of Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech,” in which the Soviet leader formally acknowledged Stalin’s tyranny and opened the way for political reform throughout the Eastern Bloc. Alfonz Bednár’s writing was one of the first free of nationalist and communist propaganda, rejecting earlier ideologization of life by both the fascist right and Stalinist left and finding more empathetic ways to explore the complexity of human experience. His novellas defy traditional heroic depictions and portray the human individual, his relations, and morality as the subject of history rather than a utopian, collectivist ideology.

In these five novellas, Bednár is preoccupied with the insensitive, even inhuman, rootless, and amoral modernity that the war and Communist Party import into traditional Slovak life. The destruction of the traditional Slovak countryside during the twentieth century through modernization and urbanization, and with it a particular approach to life, forms his central theme. His spare, epic style and devotion to plot and dynamic narration render The Hours and The Minutes a genuine and gripping read.

The first sustained cultural analysis of Russia at war that reveals how art, artists, and institutions become actors in conflict.

This book was conceived in wartime, and war stands at its center. It proceeds through an analysis of cultural phenomena and processes that, in one way or another, originated in Russia and bear on the present situation—regardless of where their actors may now reside.

Through a series of case studies, The Russian Archipelago at War Against Ukraine traces how war has entered the realm of art—literature, the visual arts, theater, film, and beyond—and examines the ways in which culture itself becomes a participant in war. What emerges are narratives of resistance and protest, of persecution and prohibition, and emergent forms of underground, but also postures of indifference, resignation, and compliance, including overt loyalty to and support for the ideology and practice of war, its perpetrators, and its objectives.

Underlying this content is a more unsettling question: what aesthetic, cultural-political, moral, and intellectual challenges, consequences, and perhaps even fragile hopes does the horror of war contain?