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[ excerpt ]
book view
also by the author:
Glorious Nemesis
A Postmortem Dream
The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch
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visions & apparitions
Selected Tales of the Uncanny
by Ladislav Klíma
translated from the Czech by Jed Slast
cover and frontispiece by Alexander Booth
Collected here for the first time in English, Visions & Apparitions represents the greater part of Klíma's output of ghost
stories. Klíma employed the horror genre as a way to explore his subjectivist philosophy, and by all accounts he enjoyed writing them
to pass the time. At times playful and lyrical, if not outright comical, the stories were written at various stages, the last text,
ostensibly a one-act play about the undead, penned (or dictated) in the final months of his life. Taken together, they reflect Klíma's
lifelong preoccupation with the nature of "reality" as a matrix of madness, hallucination, and dream permeated with all-to-real phantoms
and ghouls. Akin to Poe, ghosts emerge from the unconscious or the power of imagination and materialize as more than mere figment, visible
even to others.
Most of Klíma's short fiction was published posthumously, and often with considerable editorial intervention, even including whole passages
(if not entire texts) of dubious provenance. The present translations have largely relied on the manuscript versions, without the occasional
ersatz beginnings and endings tacked on to make a story seem less fragmentary.
Ladislav Klíma has been an important "voice calling in the wilderness." His antimetaphysical view of the world
was not unique at his time, as Europe was full of followers of Friedrich Nietzsche, both good and bad. Yet Klíma's mix of philosophical
essay, fiction, poetry, and drama was unique. Often he was too fervent in proclaiming that the only security lies in the awareness of
one's will and of one's absolute freedom. In this way he eliminated the border between truth and fiction, between waking and dreaming,
and even between life and death. If the world, from Klíma's perspective, was to be some phantasm or phantom, we would need a new way of
articulating it, of creating it anew. At the same time, the main purpose of the world would be inherent in the free and unlimited will,
life a game for the free individual. The non-conformist work of Ladislav Klíma has almost always shocked, has often incited scandal,
but has hardly ever left us indifferent. One need not accept his view of the world to experience it and enjoy it in all its ambiguity,
just as one does the stage.
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— Václav Havel
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I feel myself to be walking in the footsteps not only of Jaroslav Hasek, but also Doktor Franz Kafka, in the footsteps of what Ladislav Klíma wrote and stood for ... |
— Bohumil Hrabal
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ISBN 9788088628132
approx. 240 pp., 135 x 195 mm
softcover with flaps
B/W frontispiece
fiction
publication
UK: June 2026
US: September 2026
ordering info to come:
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