Bøker utgitt av Karolinum,Nakladatelstvi Univerzity Karlovy,Czech Republic

For The Pied Piper, Czech writer Viktor Dyk found his muse in the much retold medieval Saxon legend of the villainous, pipe-playing rat-catcher. Dyk uses the tale as a loose frame for his story of a mysterious wanderer, outcast, and would-be revolutionary--a dreamer typical of fin de siècle Czech literature who serves Dyk as a timely expression of the conflict between the petty concerns of bourgeois nineteenth-century society and the coming artistic generation. Impeccably rendered into English by Mark Corner, The Pied Piper retains the beautiful style of Dyk's original Czech. The inspiration for several theatrical and film adaptations, including a noted animated work from critically acclaimed director Jiří Barta, Dyk's classical novella is given new life by Corner's translation, proving that the piper is open to new interpretations still.

CZ;SK

CZ;SK

CZ;SK

This publication, written by Czech professor of art history Jan Royt, renders a vivid image of the capital of the Bohemian Kingdom in the High Gothic period in the broader historical context of the circumstances that were particularly favourable for Prague during Charles IV's reign (1347-1378). For the first time in history, after Charles's coronation as the Holy Roman Emperor in 1355, the capital of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown was simultaneously the metropolis of the Holy Roman Empire. Thanks to the royal and imperial care, which in addition to Charles' monarchical post in Europe also reflected his Western-European education and cosmopolitan openness as well as his belief in and respect for the Premyslid tradition, Prague flourished, becoming a unique and beautiful city. The cathedral, the stone bridge, the university and construction of the New Town and its churches laid out in a magical cross pattern, remain today as the "stone seals" on the face of Prague's Gothic architecture, endorsed by the paintings, sculpture and the entire realm of spiritual culture. The book contains around 100 photographs of Prague monuments, sights and documentary images.

Written in the years 1954-57 and treating events from the Stalinist era of Czechoslovakia's postwar Communist regime, Midway upon the Journey of Our Life flew in the face of the reigning aesthetic of socialist realism, an anti-heroic novella informed by the literary theory of Viktor Shklovsky and constructed from episodes and lyrical sketches of the author and his neighbors' everyday life in industrial north Bohemia, set against a backdrop of historical and cultural upheaval. Jedlicka, like many if not most intellectuals of his generation, was a member of the Communist Party when it came to power in February 1948, but by fall he had resigned, and shortly after, as a result, he was expelled from his studies in ethnography and esthetics at Charles University in Prague. In 1952 he and his wife had a son, and when she was offered a position as a doctor in the border town of Litvinov in 1953, the family moved. Jedlicka worked odd jobs as a laborer and tutor, with occasional freelance assignments for radio, TV and magazines, while writing Midway at night. The title of the book comes from the opening line of Inferno from Dante's Divine Comedy. For Jedlicka, Litvinov was hell. Meditative and speculative reflections here alternate and overlap with fragmentary accounts of Jedlicka's own biography and slices of the lives of the people around him, typically rendered as overheard conversations. The narrative passages range in chronology from May 1945 to the early '50s, with sporadic leaps back and forth as the "characters" go about the business of "building a new society" and the mythology that goes with it. Jedlicka and his family were residents of the Koldum (Collective House), a grandiose socialist architectural project of communal living that fails in ways comic and tragicomic alike. Jedlicka doesn't neglect to portray the era's most momentous events, including the February 25, 1948, speech by Czechoslovakia's first Communist president, Klement Gottwald, on Prague's Old Town Square, which readers of Kundera will recognize from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and which Jedlicka witnessed firsthand. But while Kundera was concerned with the grand sweep of history, Jedlicka zeroes in on more personal and quotidian features of the new order. Due to its critical view of socialist society, Jedlicka was not able to publish Midway until 1966, after the easing of cultural control. Even then, however, parts of the book were censored, and the complete version did not appear until 1994.

Peter Ackroyd's writing is obsessed with the defining heterogeneity of London--its rich diversity of human experience, mood, and emotion, of actions and events, and of the tools through which all of this heterogeneity is represented and reenacted. But for Ackroyd, one of the foremost of the so-called "London writers," this energizing heterogeneity also has a sinister side, largely originating outside social norms and mainstream pathways of cultural production. Touching on everything from occult practices to the plotting of radical groups, crime and fraud, dubious scientific experiments, and popular, dramatic forms of ritual and entertainment, Ackroyd contends that these forces both contest prescribed cultural modes and supply the city with its characteristic dynamism and capacity for spiritual renewal. This idiosyncratic London construct is particularly prominent in Ackroyd's novels, in which his ideas about the city's nature and his connection to English literary sensibilities combine to create a distinct chronotope with its own spatial and temporal properties. A Horror and a Beauty explores this world through six defining aspects of the city as Ackroyd identifies them: the relationship between London's past and present, its uncanny manifestations, its felonious tendencies, its inhabitants' psychogeographic and antiquarian strategies, its theatricality, and its inherently literary character.

For the ancient Romans, lamps were more than just a way to be able to see in the dark - they were mythical muses, witnesses to secrets, and instruments of the supernatural. This catalog brings together 210 ancient lamps excavated since 1949 in Bratislava-Rusovce. It deals with lighting devices of the Roman Empire.

The Czech king and Roman Emperor Charles IV met with the French king Charles V in Paris in 1378. Reconstructing the journey to this meeting with deft narrative talent, the author traces the king's progress from Prague to Paris, piecing together a modern chronicle from contemporary French scholarship and medieval literature.

A key personality in Czech modern art, Jan Koblasa works in diverse media. Filled with color reproductions of selected monotypes, lithographs, woodblock prints, screen prints, and computer graphics from the mid-twentieth century to the present, this book also includes an artist's time-line, updated to 2012, and a list of his works in collections.

Examining, outlining, elucidating, and supplementing the existing body of scholarship concerning the medieval theological supposition that man was created as a replacement for fallen angels, this book traces the implications of the question from the first century of the common era to the present day.

The National Gallery in Prague has in its collection a unique Japanese illustrated manuscript of ogi no soshi, a genre of waka poems illustrated in fan-shaped pictures, which blossomed from the late Muromachi to the early Edo period. This is a facsimile of this ancient illustrated manuscript of waka poetry.

The chronically homeless face a stark reality: lack of access to support systems, adequate shelter, and sustenance, with little hope for something better. This book tells of homelessness among young people - the causes and their attitudes to the various problems they face.