Jantar Publishing Ltd

A whimsical and humorous adventure through the stars. Written in 1856, ten years before the publication of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, Krutohlav and his friends set off to explore the solar system in a motorized ‘dragon’ powered by gunpowder taking with them many kinds of sausage, cheeses, pickled cabbage and wine. A very whimsical and humorous account of how Krutohlav, a country gentleman from rural Central Europe explores the solar system. His first attempt to travel to the moon in a balloon ends in failure after crashlanding in the Egyptian desert. Instead of giving up, Krutohlav builds a new craft he calls a dragon and convinces a group of his friends to travel with him around the solar system.

Balla creates a beautiful, thought-provoking, often funny portrait of human frailty. Consisting of fragments newspaper reports, TV news items, conversations, letters, voice messages and police reports related to a fragile middle-aged woman, Vargová, and her drug and alcohol dependent therapist, Dr Feleslegi. It is not clear that either of them have actually met but Vargová is fixated by Feleslegi as her therapist and sends him many messages detailing her life and thoughts covering loneliness, bullying by her father and husband and her delusion that she is still living in the former communist state of Czechoslovakia.

Dead is Balla's most recent book and marks a glorious return to the short story form. The stories are very topical dealing with the theme of masculinity, how that is expressed in different forms of aggressive nationalism, Slovak 'nativism' and delusional male interior monologues.

Andric and his girlfriend Laura have been seeing each other for a long time now but it isn't clear what each sees in the other. Self-absorbed, delusional or just a regular couple? 'Big Love is primarily a critique of contemporary society, in which the triumph of liberal democracy has increased rather than diminished the Kafkaesque aspects of life.' - Charles Sabatos.

Blanka takes a summer job at a centre for people with physical disabilities in the French city of Marseille, where her encounter with their severe conditions ends badly. A deeply unsettling, visceral tale of a young woman unravelling, evolving from carer to cared for. A novel about our own inability to escape 'our own private cages', imprisoned by fear, anxiety and mistrust, no less than indifference to others. The author: IVANA DOBRAKOVOVA (1982) graduated from Bratislava's Comenius University with a degree in English and French (translation and interpretation). She is based in Turin where she works as a freelance translator from French and Italian into Slovak, currently working on Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels. She debuted in 2009 with her short story collection Prva smrt v rodine (The First Death in the Family), followed by the novel Bellevue (2010). Her most recent collection of short stories Toxo appeared in 2013. She has won several literary competitions, including Poviedka 2008, and all three of her books have been shortlisted for the Anasoft Litera prize. In 2019, she was awarded the EU Prize for Literature.

Balla is often described as "the Slovak Kafka" for his depictions of the absurd and the mundane. In the Name of the Father features a nameless narrator reflecting on his life, looking for someone else to blame for his failed relationship with his parents and two sons, his serial adultery, the breakup of his marriage and his wife's descent into madness. Against the backdrop of their stiflingly grey provincial lives, he completely fails to act against "the thing" growing in the cellar of the house he built with his brother. The book won numerous awards in Slovakia and in this edition is accompanied by three additional short stories, which share its unique dark humour, satire and truth.