Five books by writers from Slovakia, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with The Shop on Main Street and Rivers of Babylon.
Slovakia's modern literature begins with Ľudovít Štúr, who codified the written Slovak language in the 1840s. Before that, writers in the region often used Czech or Latin, and the poet Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav later wrote the Bloody Sonnets during the First World War. For most of the years from 1918 to 1992 Slovak writers shared a state with the Czechs, and many worked under communist censorship; war and dictatorship shape much of the fiction.
Ladislav Grosman's The Shop on Main Street shows a small Slovak town during the wartime seizure of Jewish businesses under the Tiso regime. Ladislav Mňačko's Death Is Called Engelchen follows a wounded partisan looking back on guerrilla war in the mountains at the end of the Second World War. Peter Pišťanek's Rivers of Babylon is a dark satire of Bratislava in the early 1990s, and Jana Beňová's Seeing People Off gathers short, vivid pieces about the city's streets and cafés after communism.
A small Slovak town during the wartime Aryanization of Jewish businesses, showing daily life and moral compromise under the Tiso regime.
A dark, satirical novel of Bratislava's rough transition from late communism to the wild capitalism of the early 1990s.
A wounded partisan looks back on guerrilla war in the mountains at the end of the Second World War, and the divided loyalties of the villages around him.
A novel of dissident life in Bratislava during the grim 'normalization' years of 1980s communist Czechoslovakia.
Fragmentary, vivid stories of Bratislava's streets, cafés and eccentrics in the years after communism.
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