Böcker av Karel Capek

From the internationally acclaimed Czech writer Karel Capek comes this beautifully written and marvelously apt account of the trials and tribulations of the gardener’s life. First published in Prague in 1929, The Gardener’s Year combines a richly comic portrait of life in the garden, narrated month by month, with a series of delightful illustrations by the author’s older brother and collaborator, Josef. Capek’s gardeners—all too human, despite their lofty aspirations—often look the fool, whether they be found sopping wet, victims of the cobralike water hose, or hunched over, hands immersed in the soil, “presenting their rumps to the splendid azure sky.” In their repeated folly, Capek gives us not only cause for laughter but also, in the end, “testimony of the imperishable and miraculous optimism of the human race.” This Modern Library edition is published with a new Introduction by Verlyn Klinkenborg, a New York Times editorialist and the author of Making Hay and The Last Fine Time.

It is seldom that a practical guide to gardening attains the level of a literary masterpiece, still more seldom that a book on gardening can amuse and instruct even those who have no garden to plant., nor the faintest interest in acquiring one. The Gardener''s Year is a charismatic product of Karel Capek''s genius: amusing, informative, and full of a quizzical interest in people, animals and plants.In this new version, Geoffrey Newsome -the highly acclaimed translator of Capek''s witty Letters from England -has captured the grace and irony of the original Czech, to produce a volume that will be treasured equally by those who love gardening as a relaxation, by those who loathe it as a chore, and by those who have no interest in it whatsoever.

An inspiration to writers such as Orwell and Vonnegut, this is one of the great anti-utopian satires of the twentieth century and is now regarded as a modern classic. Man discovers a species of giant, intelligent newts and learns to exploit them so successfully that they gain enough skills and arms to challenge man''s place at the top of the animal kingdom. ''God bless Catbird Press for calling the attention to a great writer of the past who speaks to the present in a voice brilliant, clear, honorable, blackly funny and prophetic.'' - Kurt Vonnegut

"There was no writer like him... prophetic assurance mixed with surrealistic humour and hard-edged social satire: a unique combination" (Arthur Miller)