Everyday Spooks

A collection of seven short stories about wierd and fantastic creatures that inhabit the strange world of everyday reality in 50's and 60's communist Czechoslovakia. Following the best tradition of Czech humouristic and satiric fiction, as well as the magic, obscure and grotesque literary visions of Prague, represented mainly by Kafka's works, Karel Michal desribes, with keen and intelligent humour, fantastic encounters, where the past melts into the present, where ordinary people meet both comic and anxious figures and ghosts and where everyday speech turns into an absurd dialog. Two stories from the book (How Pimple Struck Lucky, The Cockabogey) have been filmed and Karel Michal has become well-known as an imaginative critic of "socialist reality." The book is illustrated by Dagmar Hamsikova.