- Published: 16/04/1998
- ISBN: 9781862071032
- 130x20mm
- 288 pages
My Golden Trades
Ivan Klima
One of the last artistic expressions of life under communism, this novel captures the atmosphere in Prague between 1983 and 1987, where a dance could be broken up by the secret police, a traffic offence could lead to surveillance and where contraband books were the currency of the underworld.
£9.99
Each of the six stories here is based on a job that the narrator, a banned writer, is forced to do for economic or psychic survival... Klima gives us many melodies: a real and terrifying world, a caustic and philosophic commentary, and a transcendent imagination... some of the best short stories I've ever read.
Carole Angier, New Statesman and Society
Ivan Klima must be regarded as Czechoslovakia's greatest living writer of fiction.
Philadelphia Inquirer
A consistent celebration of a man's freedom from the tyranny of circumstance... Klima had turned the various humiliating trades which he was forced to practise into the purest artistic gold.
Michael Dibdin, Independent on Sunday
From the Same Author
Ivan Klima on Granta.com
Fiction
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The Online Edition
Don’t Forsake Me
Ivan Klíma
'Bára went to the church on the advice of her friend Ivana. She had been suffering from occasional bouts of depression', Ivan Klíma in 'Don't Forsake Me' in Granta 59: France: The Outsider.
Essays & Memoir
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The Online Edition
Progress in Prague
Ivan Klíma
‘People in the West are aware of the hardship and bewilderment that accompanied the political and economic transformation of central and eastern Europe after 1989.'
Essays & Memoir
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The Online Edition
A Childhood in Terezin
Ivan Klíma
‘I am trying to reach, in memory, a time before the war began.’
