The Cowards
by Josef Skvorecky | 
Too Loud a Solitude
by Bohumil Hrabal |
The Miracle Game
by Josef Skvorecky | 
Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light
by Ivan Klima |
The Little Town Where Time Stood Still
by Bohumil Hrabal | 
Closely Watched Trains
by Bohumil Hrabal | 
The Joke
by Milan Kundera |
Love and Garbage
by Ivan Klima | 
Life Is Elsewhere
by Milan Kundera |
The Republic of Whores: A Fragment from the Time of the Cults
by Josef Skvorecky | 
Slowness
by Milan Kundera | 
Identity
by Milan Kundera | 
Miss Silver's Past
by Josef Skvorecky | 
The Engineer of Human Souls
by Josef Skvorecky | 
The Guinea Pigs
by Ludvik Vaculik | 
The Uncommon Reader
by Alan Bennett | 
Straight Man
by Richard Russo | 
Laugh-Out-Loud Jokes for Kids
by Rob Elliott | 
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
by Tom Robbins | 
This Is Where I Leave You
by Jonathan Tropper |
First published in 1971 in a typewritten edition, then finally printed in book form in 1989, I Served the King of England is "an extraordinary and subtly tragicomic novel" (The New York Times), telling the tale of Ditie, a hugely ambitious but simple waiter in a deluxe Prague hotel in the years before World War II. Ditie is called upon to serve not the King of England, but Haile Selassie. It is one of the great moments in his life. Eventually, he falls in love with a Nazi woman athlete as the Germans are invading Czechoslovakia. After the war, through the sale of valuable stamps confiscated from the Jews, he reaches the heights of his ambition, building a hotel. He becomes a millionaire, but with the institution of communism, he loses everything and is sent to inspect mountain roads. Living in dreary circumstances, Ditie comes to terms with the inevitability of his death, and with his place in history.