Hearts Too Fast. In the new prosaic book by Alena Wagnerová the reader is about to meet a range of real historical characters – the Catholic bishop Antonín Podlaha, the writers Karl Kraus and Rainer Maria Rilke, the painter Max Švabinský or the personalities of Johannes and Sidonie Nádherný. Yet it is not a historical novel.
The Little Lamp Was Burning Still. Oldřiška, the narrator of Iva Tajovská’s new novel, takes us from the beginning of the 20th century through to the summer of 1972 when the demolition of the famous Veselka Hotel in Pardubice symbolically completed her life story. As a result of her troubled family circumstances and her platonic love, she spent her youth and adulthood in loneliness and seclusion, which made her all the more sensitive to the fates of others.
The Double Chapel. The novel, an intimate confession about the childhood and adolescence of a young woman, about relationships between parents and children, is powerful in its intensity; although it is an introspective prose, a current of internal dialogues and memories of the main heroine, the reader seas a true and profound drama of a family.
Before We Part. Iva Tajovská’s new novel draws from the events of the 1990s and deals with the disintegration of states and families that occurred during the dissolution of Czechoslovakia and the civil war in Yugoslavia. In this strong and straightforward story the characters are confronted with loneliness, aging and alienation in times that were supposed to be peaceful, but instead brought new guilts and rages.
To be published: 16. 11. 2022
Literary Reportage. The writer, editor and oral historian Alena Wagnerová has been involved in the significant genre of literary reportage for more than 50 years. The collection selected by the Maraton publishing house comprises the best of her texts written in 1965–2016, i.e. both texts published in magazines in the Czech Republic, Germany and Switzerland, and those that could not be published in the late-1960s Czechoslovakia due to political reasons.
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