It took me ages to grasp how murky the literary sphere can be. The tangled route to funding often hinges on some other grant—usually destined for a foreign editor, or a translator. Put simply, without state backing, Czech titles rarely travel beyond their homeland. And even when they do, the support often amounts to a single print run, then the book simply languishes somewhere in a warehouse, forgotten. Then, after months, I might receive an email, perhaps from a Slovenian publisher like Mladinska knjiga, notifying me that four copies of my novel Kratka zgodovina Gibanja found buyers abroad. My customary reply—grateful for a job well done at keeping my work hidden—goes unacknowledged. In Poland, however, the landscape is different. I mark in my planner a forthcoming event that commemorates the nine hundredth birthday of Cosmas, the author of the Chronicle of the Bohemians, whose Polish roots have lately won wider acceptance among Czech historians after years of debate; thus the oldest Czech chronicle is now considered to be of Polish origin. Meanwhile I recall an amiable Egyptian activist who once contacted my agent years ago. She offered a fairly sizable sum for the rights to one of my novels, promising to publish it with “a cult independent Cairo press, specializing in the finest contemporary foreign prose.” The pitch sounded almost as earnest as the activist-publisher’s online bio: after earning a management degree, she worked at Telecom Egypt, and at thirty decided to found a small publishing house with a café that became a hangout for Cairo’s bohemian crowd. But a few days later, while browsing grants on the Czech Ministry of Culture site, I accidentally opened a spreadsheet labeled “Translations of Czech Prose Supported in 2018” and discovered her name perched at the top. The record showed a grant for translating my book at a rate well above the norm. She had merely acquired the rights as a pretext to obtain funding—there was never any real intention of publishing my work, and whether the novel was ever translated remains unknown. Still, as long as funds from the Czech ministry flowed into financing Cairo’s alternative scene, why not?
I stand before a classroom full of students who hang onto my every word, with not a single phone in sight. The surest way to hold their attention is to veer off into something only loosely linked to literature—perhaps a writer who recycles cigarette butts or Kundera’s recipe for devil’s toast. My carefully prepared three-part lecture on the Czech underground, which took me a month to assemble and even drew a few living legends to attend, drew a deafening silence from the room. I had hoped my guests’ anti-Communist resistance might resonate with today’s youth and their penchant for challenging the system, but I was mistaken. David even called the idea “criminally naïve” when I told him about it while planning the seminar.
“They’ll boo those old right-wingers off the stage,” he warned. “Besides, when was the last time Czech students organized a real protest?”
David is waiting for me outside after class. He leans on the railing, chatting with a buxom brunette who sits in the second row and hasn’t shown the faintest interest so far. He nods at me, then returns to her. Her name is Edita, and she is nothing like her father. She offers a courteous greeting and resumes her heated discussion with David. I step aside to sift through the papers my students handed in that day.
“Given your political leanings, I wasn’t sure if the ending of your book was meant as satire,” Edita remarks, apparently overheard.
“Reality has long surpassed fiction,” David replies. “Now more than ever. And the acronyms I drop are only for flavor. If you want authentic literary satire, try Boccaccio.”
Edita shakes her head, eager to read David Karel, she says, before reddening with embarrassment. I feel a twinge of sympathy for her.
“I push myself to farcical extremes in my latest book, Earth Above, Sky Below, don’t you think?” David continues.
“I haven’t read that one.” She blushes again and stammers that the book isn’t available anywhere.
“I’ve got a few spare copies at home. If you promise to donate it to the school library when you’re finished, you don’t need to return it.”
David’s publisher, Radler, compensates authors for their modest advances with an avalanche of complimentary copies. His entire entryway is inundated with his most recent release. He’s got so many he doesn’t know what to do with them.
As we head out, Edita lingers with a look of expectation. After a moment, David returns to her, waves, and then rejoins me. I catch Edita’s eye as she watches us from the railing.
David remains quiet until we round the corner. Then he confides that he finally followed my advice and parted ways with his publisher.
Anyone but Radler would have been a better option—Radler, who strings his authors along with opaque contracts, wrapping it all in a polished veneer as if it were a charitable venture. As if the author were the one subsidizing him. That’s what I told David, and I was relieved to hear that he’d acted on my counsel.
We spend the rest of the afternoon discussing everything—including the roadblock that has stalled his latest manuscript for months. He avoids mentioning it to Marie, which creates its own complications, and we haven’t even reached the riverbank when the topic of Irge’s “scandalous” opening comes up, set to debut in a few days. We agree that labeling something scandalous as a marketing tactic dates back at least a century, and while waiting for a kebab stand that boasts the best skewers in Prague, we still can’t decide whether Irge resents the tactic, cares about it, or actively promotes it.
We sit in the same spot as after my book launch, but on the opposite bank, chewing in silence. David dabs garlic sauce from my chin with a napkin, and a message pops up on his phone.
“She wants to know when I’ll be home.”
I study the far bank, mulling that a phone call would be faster, but David chooses to text instead. After a few years, most relationships become slow-moving battles like this, a futile pattern I recognize from my own life.
Vladimír, my ex-husband, was an engineer with an eco-friendly home-furnace company. We met when he came to our building to provide an estimate for the co-op. I was on the board at the time, a fervent advocate of communal living. On that day—driven by a tour around the apartments, chatting with neighbors I’d only known in the hallway, who then invited us in for coffee—we spent the afternoon persuading them of the benefits of economical heating. That evening, as we uncorked a bottle of wine back at my place, I felt certain Vladimír was the one. A month later we were married, and ten months after that, Judita was born. She’s only a year older than Ondřej. It surprised me when I got pregnant again; in hindsight, it felt like fortunate timing that they arrived so close together.
Across the river, a couple sits on a sweatered bench, just like us on the night of my book launch, and like us, they’re embroiled in a heated dispute. The girl pokes the guy, shoves him away, and he staggers but doesn’t fall. She pushes again; he tries to draw closer and is pushed away each time. The scene looks almost comical. I recall realizing, as a schoolgirl, that boys can hurt you. The moment I recognized that not all arguments stay verbal. Over time, many of the girls my age learned to act accordingly.
David glances up from his phone with a wearied look.
“She wants to talk to you.”
“Marie?”
David nods.
“She thinks you can reason with me.”
David helps me stand, dusting my clothes. The young couple across the river has vanished. If my current novel’s central figure had to confront whether they ever existed, that would be a question worth exploring. Dreams are the dullest instrument for storytelling, I think as we head home. Besides, I try not to think about writing outside my working hours. It’s the only way I can manage the rest of my life. Yet as my son Ondřej likes to remind me, I don’t actually have a life of my own. He’s sixteen, a typical pain, but I’m his mother, so I choose to interpret his mood as mere puberty. When I vent about him to my mother, she points out that at least he has interests. His room floor is a mosaic of comic-book pages he’s supposedly “working on.” He’ll never finish any of them, but I’ve only told him that once. My best friend Irena claims I lay impossible demands on my children. I’m still unsure what she means, besides what she sees as my insistence that they not become savages. A few months back, just before she became an activist, I asked Judita what she loved to do most. When she answered “shopping,” I had to bite my tongue. If I had to choose between her risking herself for a political cause like Jan Palach or becoming a mindless consumer…
The flicker of David’s hand as he says goodbye when we stand before my building. I invite him upstairs, but he declines, saying he must return to Marie.
“Tell her to reach out,” I say. “I’ll take her to Klakson.”
“Where?”
“A new, trendy bar.”
David either doesn’t hear or doesn’t care.
“I’m going to publish with Oto. I took your advice. We sealed it yesterday.”
That makes me happy. We part with a kiss on the cheek.
To my children I am merely a stepping stone, a lemon to be squeezed and tossed aside. It’s only natural to some degree, but the real question is what degree that is. I’m confident Judita doesn’t act out nearly as much with her father. She wouldn’t dare.
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From The Long Version by Petra Hůlová (trans. Alex Zucker). Used with permission of the publisher, World Editions NY LLC. Copyright © 2023 Petra Hůlová. Translation copyright © 2026 Alex Zucker.
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The Czech Center New York, in coordination with European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC New York), is presenting the 8th annual European Literature Night (ELN 2026) at the Ukrainian Institute of America on Wednesday, October 28th at 6:00PM ET. ELN 2026 will explore four urgent themes that are currently shaping contemporary European Literature: In the Land of Women, Breaking the Mold, Resilience & What the Earth Reveals, and Europe’s Haunted Century. Free and open to the public, the event will bring together fourteen award-winning authors, each from different European countries, who will be celebrating the English translations of their latest works during an evening of performances, readings, and panel discussions moderated by PEN America. Details for the event can be found here.
