Karel Čapek (1890-1938) is generally considered the greatest Czech author of the first half of the 20th century. This volume includes a selection of Čapek's best plays, stories, columns, essays, and travel writing, all newly translated or modernized and corrected.

In his writings, Čapek searched for the root, or the radical center, of our contradictions and mysteries. From a paean to clumsy people and the discovery of a single footprint in an untrodden field of snow, to dramatic meditations on mortality and commitment, there is little that Karel Čapek did not examine in his uniquely humorous and searching way.

CONTENTS -- Plays (all in new translations): R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), The Makropulos Secret, The Mother, and Act II of From the Life of the Insects.

Prose: Stories from "Tales from Two Pockets," "Apocryphal Tales," and "Cross Roads." Plus humorous and serious newspaper columns, excerpts from travel books and a book on gardening, and Čapek's introduction to "At the Crossroads of Europe," a 1938 book published by PEN to show why Czechoslovakia should be supported by the West.

"Imagine discovering the rich, warm humanity of a Dickens or a Gogol, and you have some idea of the impact of this selection from the work of Czechoslovakia's foremost twentieth-century writer."

—Booklist

God bless Catbird Press for calling the attention of Americans to a great writer of the past who speaks to the present in a voice brilliant, clear, honorable, blackly funny, and prophetic.

—Kurt Vonnegut

[Čapek] tells his stories with true delight and with complete naturalness, and his tone has something engaging and intimate about it. This is expressed above all in his columns and short stories, which I consider the most agreeable reading (and this adjective is meant without any malice!) that I know.

—Milan Kundera

It is time to read Čapek again for his insouciant laughter, and the anguish of human blindness that lies beneath it. ... He is a joy to read – a wonderfully surprising teller of some fairly astonishing and unforgettable tales.

—Arthur Miller