Alex Zucker

a novel by Magdaléna Platzová (2024, Bellevue Literary Press)

“Magdaléna Platzová's novel offers a new key to Kafka's world: we look at it through the tender and sorrowful gaze of the people whose fate had been marked by him personally. An utterly touching book!” — Agnieszka Holland

“the novel succeeds thanks to its elastic bounce through time and playful blurring of history and imagination. As Felice Bauer receives her spotlight, Platzová deserves one, too.” — Publishers Weekly

an anthology edited by Ivana Myšková and Jan Zikmund (2023, Comma Press)

“This anthology deserves to be read, re-read and savoured. It is an excellent introduction to the work of those authors who are less well-known in the English-speaking world, and a good travelling companion for anyone setting out to discover Prague.” — Fiona Graham, European Literature Network

“A unique and almost indescribable mix of Gothic fiction, steampunk gadgetry (designed by Czech animation wizard Jan Švankmajer), slapstick comedy and romantic opera, director Oldřich Lipský’s wonderfully bonkers delight has elements of THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS, Terry Gilliam, Mel Brooks and ‘The Benny Hill Show.’ [. . .] MYSTERIOUS CASTLE was the third fantastical film from the team of director Lipský and writer Jiří Brdečka after their much-loved musical western spoof LEMONADE JOE (1966) and their detective/horror satire ADELA HAS NOT HAD SUPPER YET (1977), both major Czech cult hits.” Available now on Blu-ray from Deaf Crocodile. 

Director Jiří Barta’s stop-motion animated masterpiece, based on The Pied Piper of Hamelin, is set in a dark and twisted medieval village of narrow streets and weird Gothic arches, half-Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and half-Jan van Eyck. Available now on Blu-ray from Deaf Crocodile. 

A supernatural vision of modern and ancient Prague, from directors Jiří Brdečka, Miloš Machovec, Evald Schorm. Filled with medieval catacombs, Qabbalistic magic, occult rituals, and giant golems, the long-lost anthology film Prague Nights. Available now on Blu-ray from Deaf Crocodile.

a novel by Jáchym Topol (2023, Margellos World Republic of Letters at Yale University Press)

“To have a translator with Zucker’s experience and expertise working with such a complex and at times distractingly off-the-wall novel is a real gift to readers (and critics). [. . .] Topol is clearly concerned about what comes next. [. . .] What kind of Czech Republic, and indeed what kind of planet, is going to be around in the next 20 years? In the next five? And will either of those places be worth living in?” — Los Angeles Review of Books

a novel by Bianca Bellová (2022, Parthian Books)

—Winner, EBRD Literature Prize

“The Lake feels less like it takes place in a post-USSR past than it does a post-apocalyptic future of complete climate collapse. Nami’s country might be fiction, but its implications are terrifyingly real.” — Wales Arts Review

“It is utterly propulsive, immersive and unique, and deserves to become a European classic, to be read by many generations to come.” — Toby Lichtig, chair of judges, EBRD Literature Prize 2023

essays by philosopher and cultural critic Jan Patočka (2022, Bloomsbury)

“Jan Patočka’s contribution to phenomenology and the philosophy of history mean that he is considered one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. In this new book of essential Patočka texts, of which the majority have been translated from the original Czech for the first time, readers will experience a general introduction to the key tenets of his philosophy.” — Bloomsbury

a novel by Petra Hůlová (2021, World Editions)

“One part Animal Farm, one part The Handmaid’s Tale, one part A Clockwork Orange, and (maybe) one part Frankenstein, Czech writer Hůlová’s novel dismantles the patriarchy and replaces it with a terrifying alternative.” — Kirkus

a novel by J. R. Pick (2018, Karolinum) 

“In Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, absurdity and black humor are the very tools of survival, a way through the nightmare. This powerful and moving book helps us make peace with, if not sense of, the unthinkable.” — Los Angeles Review of Books

a novel by Petra Hůlová (2017, Jantar)

—English PEN Translates Award

“Three Plastic Rooms is a frighteningly honest novel — not easy to like, but impossible not to appreciate.” — Los Angeles Review of Books 

a novel by Jáchym Topol (2017, Dalkey Archive Press)

“Angel Station is a seething novel of accumulation, fast, strange, and destructive.” — Full Stop

“A graphic, grungy tale of addiction and consequences.” — Kirkus

a novel by Magdaléna Platzová (2016, Bellevue Literary Press)

—Longlist, International Dublin Literary Award

“. . . Platzová’s ultra-restrained curation of her material, translated with equal restraint and discrimination by Alex Zucker, has excluded every superfluous detail, every hint of preachiness or sentimentality or pat morality. The result is a powerfully distilled meditation on the meaning of freedom, a ferocious complexity lurking beneath its smooth and hypnotically readable surface.” — Words Without Borders

a novel by Tomáš Zmeškal (2016, Margellos World Republic of Letters at Yale University Press)

“Tomáš Zmeškal’s fascinating novel of 2008, here adroitly translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker, plays between these poles of fantasy and bureaucracy, and their different ways of managing human life.” — Times Literary Supplement

a novel by Josef Jedlička (2016, Karolinum Press)

“One of the outstanding works of 1950s Czech literature, Josef Jedlička’s Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life is a book of and out of its time: an expression of disillusionment with the oppressive Stalinism of Czechoslovak Communism, it was first published in a censored version in 1966, and only appeared in full in 1994, after Jedlička’s death and the fall of the Communist regime. This excellent translation by Alex Zucker, elegantly published by Karolínum Press, is its first into English.” — Times Literary Supplement

a novel by Heda Margolius Kovály (2015, Soho Press)

“. . . a remarkable work of art with the intrigue of a spy puzzle, the irony of a political fable, the shrewdness of a novel of manners, and the toughness of a hard-boiled murder mystery.” — Wall Street Journal

a novel by Jáchym Topol (2013, Portobello Books/Granta)

—Fiction Longlist, Best Translated Book Award
—Typographical Translation Award
—English PEN Award for Writing in Translation

—Longlist, International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

“. . . should help to cement Jáchym Topol’s reputation as one of the most original and compelling European voices at work today.” — Times Literary Supplement

a novel by Patrik Ouředník (2011, Dalkey Archive Press)

A pitiless portrait of the often unbridgeable gap between theory and practice, The Opportune Moment, 1855 is another uproarious and unsettling attack on convention by one of literature’s great provocateurs.

a novel by Patrik Ouředník (2010, Dalkey Archive Press)

“. . . a gleeful skewering of the Czech national character and a character-rich, dialogue-sassy send-up colored by a lingering Communist legacy.” — Publishers Weekly

a novel by Petra Hůlová (2009, Northwestern University Press)

—National Translation Award, American Literary Translators Association

“. . . an acutely observed account — compelling despite its grimness — of the lives of its semi-nomadic subjects.” — Times Literary Supplement

a novel by Jáchym Topol (2000, Catbird Press)

—Featured in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

“City Sister Silver is a first novel the way The Tin Drum and Midnight’s Children were first novels—a prodigal astonishment; an emancipation proclamation.” — John Leonard, Newsday

“Readers embarking on City Sister Silver are in for an exhilarating, exasperating journey . . . kaleidoscopic and ethereal, full of motion for its own sake, with many memorable stops along the route.” — Neil Bermel, New York Times Book Review

“Topol’s book is a fervent effort by a post–Cold War writer to break away from the familiar dissident mode of his seniors and to stake out the fresh troubles that freedom and, more to the point, a raw market economy have spawned since the Velvet Revolution.” — Patricia Hampl, Los Angeles Times Book Review

a novella by Jáchym Topol (1995, Petrov; 2011, Albatros Plus)

“A Trip to the Train Station rips the mask off the Golden City, exposing a whore with a beat-up face, ill-fitting high heels and twin addictions to violence and the quick buck. Whichever Prague you’re living in, Topol’s story offers a fascinating taste of a young writer well worth trying.” — Julie Ashley, Prague Post