3 results for "Literary Fiction"

The transformation and other stories

Kafka, Franz
A companion volume to "The Great Wall of China and Other Short Works, " these new translations bring together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he thought worthy of publication. This volume contains his most famous story. "The Transformation, " more popularly known as "Metamorphosis." Other works include "Meditation, " a collection of his earlier studies; "The Judgement, " written in a single night of frenzied creativity; "The Stoker, " the first chapter of a novel set in America; and "A Fasting Artist, " a collection of stories written towards the end of Kafka's life. There is also a fascinating occasional piece, "The Aeroplanes at Brescia, " Kafka's eye-witness account of an air display in 1909. Taken together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.
Penguin 1992 236 pages

Innocence: or, murder on Steep Street

Kovály, Heda
"This rediscovered gem of Czech literature, a crime novel by renowned Holocaust memoirist Heda Margolius Kovaly, depicts a chilling moment in history, redolent with the stifling atmosphere of political and personal oppression of the early days of Socialist Czechoslovakia. In 1985, Czech Holocaust memoirist, literary translator, and political exile Heda Margolius Kovaly turned her pen to fiction. Inspired by the stories of Raymond Chandler, Kovaly knit her own terrifying experiences in early 1950s Socialist Prague -- her husband's imprisonment and wrongful execution, her own persecution at his disgrace -- into a gorgeous psychological thriller-cum-detective novel. Set in and around a cinema where a murder was recently committed, Innocence follows the unfolding of the investigation while telling the stories of the women who work there as ushers, each of whom is forced to support herself in difficult circumstances. As the novel brings this group alive, it tells their various life stories that have brought them to this job, the secrets they share with one another, and the secrets they keep. When the detective trying to solve the first murder is found slain by the cinema, all of their secrets come into the light. A smart, evocative, and deeply stirring literary crime novel with international appeal"--
Soho Crime 2015 234 pages

Far to go

Pick, Alison
Winner of the Helen and Stan Vine Jewish Book Award and finalist for the Man Booker Prize In Far to Go, one of our most accomplished young writers takes us inside the world of an affluent Jewish family in Prague during the lead-up to Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia. In 1939, Pavel and Anneliese Bauer are secular Jews whose lives are turned upside down by the arrival of Hitler. They are unable to leave the country in time to avoid deportation, but they do manage to get their six-year-old son Pepik a place on a Kindertransport. Meanwhile, a fascinating and compelling present-day strand in the story slowly reveals the unexpected fates of each of the Bauers. Through a series of surprising twists, Pick leads us to ask: What does it mean to cling to identity in the face of persecution? And what are the consequences if you attempt to change your identity? Inspired by the harrowing five-year journey Alison Pick's own grandparents embarked upon from their native Czechoslovakia to Canada during the Second World War, Far to Gois an epic historical novel that traces one family's journey through these tumultuous and traumatic events. A layered, beautifully written, moving, and suspenseful story by one of our rising literary stars.
House of Anansi Press 2010-01-01 314 pages