Mark Slouka: 7 books

A new collection of prophetic essays from one of the sharpest practitioners of the form Mark Slouka writes from a particular vantage point, one invoked by Thoreau, who wished "to improve the nick of time . . . to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future." At this...

"I have never before read anything except Nabokov’s Speak, Memory that so relentlessly and shrewdly exhausted the kindness and cruelty of recollection’s shaping devices." —Geoffrey Wolff Born in Czechoslovakia, Mark Slouka’s parents survived the Nazis only to have to escape...

A searing, poignantly rendered collection of stories chronicling the lives of ordinary people battling the forces of love and loss, from "one of the great unsung writers of our time" (Colum McCann). In fifteen beautifully wrought stories—ranging from occupied Czechoslovakia to California’s...

“A vibrantly told love story” with tragic roots in WWII Czechoslovakia (The Washington Post). An American-born son of Czech immigrants grows up in postwar New York, part of a boisterous community of the displaced where he learns fragments of European history, Czech fairy tales, and family...

A powerful story about an unforgettable friendship between two teenage boys and their hopes for escape from a dead-end town. The year is 1968. The world is changing, and sixteen-year-old Jon Mosher is determined to change with it. Racked by guilt over his older brother’s childhood death and...

"If you can read [God’s Fool] without being astonished and touched, then you’d better check to see if your heart is made of stone…simply brilliant. A book of the year." —Dallas Morning News Born attached at the chest, Chang and Eng were considered a marvel, an act of God....

“Relentlessly observant, miraculously expressive, these [stories] see through the mirrored surface into a hidden yet strangely intimate world.” —New York Times Book Review Set in a tiny Czech community on the shores of Lost Lake, these stories chronicle three generations of men and women...