Bøker av Karel Čapek

A new source of low-cost energy infects the world with religious and nationalistic fervor in this satirical sci-fi novel, a prescient fable of the benefits and dangers of atomic power.

From the internationally acclaimed Czech writer Karel Capek comes this beautifully written and marvelously apt account of the trials and tribulations of the gardener’s life. First published in Prague in 1929, The Gardener’s Year combines a richly comic portrait of life in the garden, narrated month by month, with a series of delightful illustrations by the author’s older brother and collaborator, Josef. Capek’s gardeners—all too human, despite their lofty aspirations—often look the fool, whether they be found sopping wet, victims of the cobralike water hose, or hunched over, hands immersed in the soil, “presenting their rumps to the splendid azure sky.” In their repeated folly, Capek gives us not only cause for laughter but also, in the end, “testimony of the imperishable and miraculous optimism of the human race.” This Modern Library edition is published with a new Introduction by Verlyn Klinkenborg, a New York Times editorialist and the author of Making Hay and The Last Fine Time.

A brilliant scientist invents the Karburator, a reactor that can create abundant and practically free energy. However, the Karburator's super-efficient energy production also yields a powerful by-product the Absolute, the spiritual essence held within all matter, into the world.

Anyone in search of England can do no better than to take up Karel Capek's Letters from England. Humorous, insightful and imbued with a profound humanity, Capek's letters convey a bemused admiration for a country which in the 1920's still lived according to the memory of its greatness.

Playful and provocative, irreverent and inspiring, Capek is perhaps the best-loved Czech writer of all time. Novelist and playwright, famed for inventing the word 'robot' in his play RUR, Capek was a vital part of the burgeoning artistic scene of Czechoslovakia of the 1920s and 30s. But it is in his journalism - his brief, sparky and delightful columns - that Capek can be found at his most succinct, direct and appealing.This selection of Capek's writing, translated into English for the first time, contains his essential ideas. The pieces are animated by his passion for the ordinary and the everyday - from laundry to toothache, from cats to cleaning windows - his love of language, his lyrical observations of the world and above all his humanism, his belief in people. His letters to his wife Olga, also published here, are extraordinarily moving and beautifully distinct from his other writings. Uplifting, enjoyable and endlessly wise, Believe in People is a collection to treasure.

It is seldom that a practical guide to gardening attains the level of a literary masterpiece, still more seldom that a book on gardening can amuse and instruct even those who have no garden to plant., nor the faintest interest in acquiring one. The Gardener''s Year is a charismatic product of Karel Capek''s genius: amusing, informative, and full of a quizzical interest in people, animals and plants.In this new version, Geoffrey Newsome -the highly acclaimed translator of Capek''s witty Letters from England -has captured the grace and irony of the original Czech, to produce a volume that will be treasured equally by those who love gardening as a relaxation, by those who loathe it as a chore, and by those who have no interest in it whatsoever.

An inspiration to writers such as Orwell and Vonnegut, this is one of the great anti-utopian satires of the twentieth century and is now regarded as a modern classic. Man discovers a species of giant, intelligent newts and learns to exploit them so successfully that they gain enough skills and arms to challenge man''s place at the top of the animal kingdom. ''God bless Catbird Press for calling the attention to a great writer of the past who speaks to the present in a voice brilliant, clear, honorable, blackly funny and prophetic.'' - Kurt Vonnegut

"There was no writer like him... prophetic assurance mixed with surrealistic humour and hard-edged social satire: a unique combination" (Arthur Miller)