Alex Zucker’s 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. He has also translated stories, plays, subtitles, young adult and children’s books, song lyrics, reportages, essays, poems, philosophy, art history, and an opera.
Zucker’s 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”) is out from Margellos World Republic of Letters at Yale University Press January 3, 2023, in the US and January 10 in the UK.
Currently, he is seeking publishers for four 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 (excerpt here), by Klára Vlasáková. For samples, synopses, and author bios, write alexz (dot) nyc (at) gmail (dot) com.
Zucker also maintains 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, he has been a member of the Cedilla & Co. literary translators’ collective.