My translations from Czech include novels by Jáchym Topol, Bianca Bellová, Petra Hůlová, J. R. Pick, Magdaléna Platzová, Tomáš Zmeškal, Josef Jedlička, Heda Margolius Kovály, Patrik Ouředník, and Miloslava Holubová. I have also Englished stories, plays, subtitles, young adult and children’s books, song lyrics, reportages, essays, poems, philosophy, art history, and an opera.
The Book of Prague: A City in Short Fiction, including my translation of the essay “Žižkovite,” by Patrik Banga, will be out from Comma Press in October. Preorder it now.
My translation of The Lake, by Bianca Bellová, was named winner of the 2023 EBRD Literature Prize. Chair of judges Toby Lichtig said: “utterly propulsive, immersive and unique, [it] deserves to become a European classic, to be read by many generations to come.” Buy your copy here.
My translation of A Sensitive Person, by Jáchym Topol (“A brutally funny, carnivalesque novel about love, death, and survival, from the Czech Republic’s greatest living author”) was published by Margellos World Republic of Letters at Yale University Press on January 3, 2023, in the US and January 10 in the UK.
Life After Kafka, my translation of Magdaléna Platzová’s novel Život po Kafkovi, is due out from Bellevue Literary Press in August 2024. Preorder it here.
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Currently, I am seeking publishers for five novels: Biography of a Black-and-White Lamb, by Tomáš Zmeškal; Dust Collectors (excerpts here and here) and Deathmaiden (winner of the European Union Prize for Literature; excerpt here), by Lucie Faulerová; and Cracks (about a levitating sphere whose inexplicable appearance rocks society on Earth; excerpt here) and Bodies (about mothers, daughers, and their bodies), by Klára Vlasáková. For samples, synopses, and author bios, write alexz (dot) nyc (at) gmail (dot) com.
I also maintain a list of Czech literature translated into English, from 1987 to the present, at bit.ly/czechlitinenglish. (For works prior to 1987, see George J. Kovtun’s Czech and Slovak Literature in English. A Bibliography. Second Edition.) Since 2018, I have been a member of the Cedilla & Co. literary translators’ collective.