Chess Story, also known as The Royal Game, is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig's final achievement, completed in Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942. It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does so with characteristic emphasis on the psychological.

The theme of Hrabal's famous prose is the life of Jan Dítet, a waiter, later a hotelier and finally a traveler during a time of political upheaval. It is a book about Czechness, the greatness and ugliness within us, which was made into a film by Jirí Menzel in 2006.

A worker at a waste paper collection center, Hanta, has worked at a printing press for thirty-five years. He rescues rare books from piles of paper, reads them, and is thus ''educated against his will.'' The novella Too Noisy Solitude is Hanta’s inner monologue with many recurring motifs. The reader gets to know Hanta’s first love, Mancinka, and the gypsy Ilonka, who disappeared in a...

The Good Soldier Švejk is one of the most famous and popular characters not only in Czech but also in world literature. This is evidenced by the fact that, along with numerous editions at home and abroad, the work has become a classic in the true sense of the word, which is constantly read and quoted. Perhaps we could also talk about a part of our national character, whether in a good or...

The War with the Newts develops over a long period of time as a collage of newspaper clippings and other brilliantly parodied records about the miraculous Newts who learn to speak, work, and behave like humans, only lacking the ability to think creatively. Behind the seemingly entertaining and witty satire on newspaper sensationalism, what Capek considered the greatest danger to human...

Capek's novel Krakatit is based on a similar invention to the one described by the author in The Absolute Factory. The inventor Prokop discovers a way to let any substance disintegrate into atoms. The explosion releases a huge amount of energy. He produces a substance called krakatit - the most terrible explosive in the world, which can be detonated remotely using electromagnetic waves. Prokop...

For the first time in the last hundred years, the prose of Hryhoriy Kvitka-Osnovyanenko returns to readers as it really was. With its own rhythm and special Slobozhan dialect. Vengeful witches, the dead who celebrate Easter, enchanted treasures, a tumbleweed - a witness against a murderer... Before us appears a vivid and mystical picture of life in Ukrainian lands from Konotop to Kharkiv....

'Women's' texts by a man... Is this even possible? The unexpected and non-chronicle Franko convincingly proves that it is. Sexual slavery, prostitution and human trafficking, war and post-traumatic syndrome, the theory and practice of lies and the pickup technique, the crisis of traditional marriage and patriarchal morality, criminal crimes and investigation, mobbing and suicide - all this is...

Valerian Pidmohylnyi wanted to write a novel in which the ship's master would be a woman. And he wrote 'A Little Drama' - a novel about new relationships, a new way of life, a new morality and eternal questions that arise in the unexpected surprises of the age of technological progress. Crazy irrational passion or cold rational calculation - who will emerge victorious from the duel? Is victory...

Odesa, where only furious storms from the sea flew in. Ukrainian cinema, fresh and bold, like a cabin boy on a tall mast. Young people who are looking for themselves and find — friendship, love, loyalty, courage. A director, an artist, a ballerina, a sailor, Odessa fishermen, port girls, a film factory director, a schooner owner. A subtle love intrigue, the spirit of romance and creative...

Do you want to visit Paris at the beginning of the 20th century? To look at the city through the eyes of a writer — a modernist and a provocateur? Do you like artistic reflections and at the same time light reading? The novel ‘Balance’ and the story ‘The Secret’ by Volodymyr Vynnychenko — about life and death, love and hate, art and morality. About risky experiments, difficult relationships and...

A woman and her ‘relationship’ with the world is the main theme of Olga Kobylyanska’s prose. Is it good to get married happily or to neglect personal happiness for the sake of art? This is the point at which the search is focused in the story ‘Behind Situations’ and the short story ‘Ideas’. A fatal coincidence of circumstances, mystical signs and hypnosis sessions are intertwined with...