Argo Publishing: Petra Hůlová - The Highest Card

A scandalous revelation or a hoax? Provocation or reality? Autobiography or fiction?

Writer Sylvie Novak looks back on her successful career as a committed author and reflects on her complicated personal life. In her reminiscences, she often returns to a long-ago initiatory relationship with a much older writer. In short, she takes stock of the past. And then there is the present:

hanging out with a new book of feminist essays, visible aging and the "female invisibility" syndrome that Sylvie fights in her own way. But above all, there is her daughter Judith, who is indiscriminate against her mother and eventually pulls the ultimate card against her...

Against the backdrop of various thought stereotypes, hard-to-bridge generational differences or various forms of social activism, we follow the description of a struggle.

"A well-aimed shot into their own ranks. A harsh, hurtful and above all self-pitying confession of the heroine - an ageing intellectual, mother of two children, lover of many men. It is uttered in one breath. And so it reads." (Alena Makhoninova - Russian Studies)

"Can a woman realize after twenty years that she has become a victim of Me Too? Or did one have to be born into the respective Me Too generation? An extraordinary novel about the culture wars in our everyday lives." (Tereza Matějčková - philosopher)

"We can't rewrite the past, but it keeps insistently rewriting us. Petra Hůlová has written a book of disillusionment and reconciliation of a passionate feminism that has run out of time for the physiology of the body." (Petr Fischer - critic and columnist)

"In Petra Hůlová's The Highest Card, we have the opportunity to experience the changing of generations as a crusade of the incoming one, which comes in a blinded rage to condemn the outgoing one." (S.d.Ch. - playwright of film scripts).

Petra Hůlová is one of the most translated and genre-versatile Czech novelists. Her work ranges from psychological probes into interpersonal relationships, such as Zlodějka mýho táty (2019) or Macocha (2014), to adventure stories such as Stanice Tajga (2008) or Paměť mojí babičce (2002), alternative Czech history (Strážci občanského dobra, 2010) and dystopia (Stručné dějiny Hnutí, 2018). Hůlová has won numerous literary prizes for her work, including the Magnesia Litera, the Jiří Orten Prize and the Josef Škvorecký Prize. She also writes plays and film scripts.

Free admission.