The Arsonist
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Awarded the Czechoslovak State Prize for Literature in 1936, The Arsonist explores the world of youth against the backdrop of a small eastern Bohemian border town being menaced by an invisible firebug. Time and fire, their ability to reshape and destroy, are central. Encoded in echo, wind, and smoke -- in the gesture and in the whisper -- the true nature of events is too intangible and fleeting, too pregnant with the unknown, to provide any genuine certainty, and this is the real source of the townsfolk's terror. Their misguided attempts to identify the elusive arsonist ultimately reveal the emptiness and inflexibility of their own lives. One of the most distinctive voices in 20th-century Czech letters, Hostovský's mix of mysticism, irony, and wit, all leavened by the influence of Expressionism on his early work, results in a richly textured narrative amid an atmosphere of growing peril that serves as a harbinger of the catastrophe to come. This is the first English translation.
Egon Hostovský
Egon Hostovský (1908–1973) was one of the foremost Czech writers of the twentieth century. Related to Stefan Zweig and much admired by Graham Greene, he was awarded Czechoslovakia’s State Prize for Literature in 1936. He fled the Nazis and then the Communists, and eventually settled in New York, where he worked for Radio Free Europe. His books were banned in communist Czechoslovakia, but were published in the US to great acclaim.
Christopher G Morris
Translated by
Christopher Morris is owner of Morris Books and a professional lexicographer who has edited more than 20 different dictionaries on a wide variety of subjects. He is editor in chief of the award-winning Academic Press Dictionary of Science and Technology, which provides the largest vocabulary of science yet compiled and features special essays by 120 eminent scientists, including nine Nobel laureates. He served as chief editor of the Macmillan school dictionary series, which includes several of the largest-selling educational dictionaries in U.S. history. He has also been an author of school and college textbooks and has compiled many different scientific glossaries, for fields such as ecology, endocrinology, microbiology, oncology, reproductive biology, and toxicology. He and Cutler Cleveland previously collaborated on the Encyclopedia of Energy, winner of an American Library Association award, for which Dr. Cleveland was editor in chief and he served as chief development editor.
Christopher Morris
Translated by
Christopher Morris is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at George Mason University.
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