Jiří Hájíček's award-winning novel Rustic Baroque (Selský baroko) debuts in English

   Real World Press is pleased to announce its English-language publication in paperback and ebook (Kindle) formats of Jiří Hájíček's award-winning Rustic Baroque (Selský baroko). The new translation of this rising Czech literary figure's most important novel also includes four additional stories from his Dřevěný nůž (The Wooden Knife). From November 2012, Rustic Baroque is available worldwide (in paperback and Kindle) formats through Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com and in selected bookstores and other shops in the Czech Republic.

   Winner of the Magnesia Litera prize as the best Czech novel of 2005, Rustic Baroque is set in South Bohemia about a decade after the Velvet Revolution. The story recalls the tumult in the countryside during the 1950s collectivization of agriculture, sheds light upon the torn social fabric in the decades to follow, and characterizes how Czech people of all generations struggle to come to grips with the unresolved remnants of their past since the communists were driven from power in 1989.

   Hájíček's novel and stories will be appreciated by anyone who has ever visited or plans to visit the Czech Republic. (Preview a sample here.) The translator has annotated the English text to enhance the reader's appreciation for Czech life and culture. In combination with the original Czech version, Rustic Baroque makes an excellent reader for those who are learning Czech or for Czech speakers wishing to improve their English.

   "Rustic Baroque is one of those quiet, unassuming novels that sneaks up on you; the kind of book that draws you in and bears you along easily and languidly and then turns, just at the right moment, and very politely kicks you in the gut."
   –From Booktrust

   "...wonderfully told, slowly revealing more information and taking many twists and turns"
   -From A Common Reader

   "Hájíček … has successfully discovered an extraordinary technique for portraying traditional subject matter. The result is prose written with exceptional feeling for the poetry of the countryside, observed from a historical perspective while commingling the present with the past."
   –Aleš Haman, Lidové noviny (on the Czech original)

Also newly available as a Kindle ebook from Real World Press: Untangling Bosnia and Hercegovina

   "…provides insights into ordinary people living in a moral twilight that is neither the darkness of war nor the full light of peace, where truth, goodness and fairness are not easily distinguished from falsehood, evil and injustice."
   – From the book's description

   "Highly recommended, insightful, informative reading"
   – Midwest Book Review