War with the Newts (Penguin Modern Classics)

Literature & Fiction

Karel Čapek

Humor & Satire

Penguin Classics

The Gardener's Year

Karel Capek's The Gardener's Year is a timeless classic of wit and wisdom, sure to capture the heart and imagination of every gardener—indeed, everyone who has pursued any hobby with a passion that occasionally overrides good common sense. Originally published more that fifty years ago in Czechoslovakia, it transcends the years with grace and ease. Whether Capek is talking about the lack or surfeit of rain, the fruitless search for space to plant just a few more perennials, or the unfathomable mystery of the green thumb, his words strike chord upon chord within every gardener, in every time and place. Fifty-eight sprightly drawings by Karel Capek's brother Josef Capek, lend themselves perfectly to the artful simplicity and humour of this book. Through the year, Capek does battle with the garden hose, learns the value of patience in spring, prays to the Lord for rain (but only on certain parts of the garden, please), buys far too many plants at every opportunity, curses raspberry canes that invade from his neighbor's garden, routs stones from the soil (they seem to grow from spores), and agonizes continually about the garden while he is on vacation in August. In short, Karel Capek is a gardener, timeless, with all the frailties, hope, and boundless optimism necessarily shared by all gardeners. After the sun sets, he leans on his spade and sighs with deep content: "I have sweated today!"

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Gardening & Landscape Design

The University of Wisconsin Press

One of the classics of twentieth-century theater, this brilliantly conceived and exquisitely executed play by Czech playwright Karel Čapek (1890–1938) looks to a future in which all workers are automatons, or "robots" — a word this play made a permanent part of the language. The robots revolt when their manufacturing formula is changed to make them more irritable and to give them the human ability to hate, and the resulting catastrophe makes for a powerful and deeply moving theatrical experience. "It is murderous social satire, done in terms of the most hair-raising melodrama," wrote Alexander Woolcott in his 1922 review of the first U.S. performance of this universally admired play. Heywood Broun wrote, "Čapek is potentially one of the great men in the modern drama. He has devised a scene at the end of the third act as awesome as anything we have ever seen in the theatre." This is the scene in which one of the last remaining humans, knowing himself and his species to be doomed, muses: "It was a great thing to be a man. There was something immense about it."

R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) (Dover Thrift Editions: Plays)

Dramas & Plays

Dover Publications

This booklet was required reading for a course I took on Futurism and Robotics back in 1995. Was kept on the shelves or in climate controlled storage since then.

R. U. R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) A Fantastic Melodrama in Three Acts and an Epilogue

Samuel French, Inc.

The World We Live In (The Insect Comedy)

Josef Čapek

Written against the background of the rise of Nazism, War With the Newts concerns the discovery in the South Pacific of a sea-dwelling race, which is enslaved and exploited by mankind. In time they rebel, laying siege to the strongholds of their former masters in a global war for supremacy. R.U.R., or Rossum's Universal Robots, seen by many as a modern interpretation of the 'golem' myth, is regarded as the most important play in the history of SF. It introduced the word 'robot' and gave the genre one of its most enduring tropes.

R.U.R.: War with the Newts

Humor & Entertainment

Gollancz

War with the Newts

Northwestern University Press

Modern fairy tales mix fairies, elves, talking animals, and supernatural beings with detectives, mailmen, secret police, and Hollywood stars\nFrom Publishers Weekly\nTrue to its name, this 1932 collection by the Czech author of War with the Newts is crowded with sprites, fairies and others of that insubstantial ilk. Genuine fantasy results, however, when they cross paths with stubbornly human types in such sweetly absurd scenes as when a policeman serves notice to a dragon ("Hello there . . . mind showing me your papers? Do you have an ID? A gun permit? A library card?") or a bevy of doctors diagnoses a magician gagging on a plum pit (variously acute prunitis, choking plumitis, stonepititis of the pharynx and prunoplumryx stonepititis). The author's brother contributes illustrations and one tale "for good measure," adding his gentle mark to a mix that smacks of Wilde, in the beatific magician of "The Great Cat's Tale"; of Gogol, in the incorrigible hat of "The Tramp's Tale"; of Kipling throughout; and, above all, of Capek's own animism, endowing cat, mailman, hydra, American detective and frog with good, jovial souls. 
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Nine Fairy Tales by Karel Capek and One More Thrown in for Good Measure

Northwestern Univ Pr

The Absolute at Large

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction

Hyperion Press Incorporated of Westport, CT

R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots

Karel Capek (1890-1938) - the Czech dramatist, novelist and journalist. 
R.U.R. (1921) has made the author internationally famous, perhaps even immortal. The word "Robot" (from the Czech robota, meaning drudgery), which has since been adopted by practically all languages, appears here for the first time. What is today classified as Science Fiction, in Capek's days was known as Utopia, and the author used this genre for making weighty social commentaries. After nearly a century, the play has withstood the test of time; the Robot's revolt and its consequences could for instance be seen as a warning against giving the scientists a free hand in pursuit of genetic research, no matter how noble and beneficial the aims might appear to be. This is a new English translation.
The Robber (1920) is essentially a romantic comedy, with some dramatic twists. The play, Capek's favourite, is still enormously popular with the Czech audiences. This is believed to be the first English translation.

R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)

Booksplendour Publishing, Brisbane

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Books by Karel Čapek