Argo Publishing: Pánek, Palán, Technik - three novel images of our time

JOSEF PÁNEK

I AM THEIR GOD

A new novel by the Magnesia Litera Award winner

Bergen, Norway, 1999. Light and darkness; consciousness and unconsciousness; inner and outer world; unbreakable confidence and overwhelming doubt. Pride and fall.
Loss and search. The whirlwind of obsessive thoughts and existential disorientation experienced by the hero of Josef Pánek's new novel
expose the vertigo of uncompromising writing that at times frightens itself. Who is the idol, the self-assured god, who does not doubt his uniqueness in the slightest, always knows what he wants, and does it without remorse? The young man whom all his friends admire without limits? And what happens to him when, by his own choice, he loses the security of his home, where he knows everything, where he is in control - or so he thinks - and moves from post-revolutionary Czechia to Bergen in search of a scientific career? To a city where it is always dark and gloomy, where it rains half the year round, where no one understands anyone; where loneliness and abandonment take on a whole new dimension... What happens to him in a place where he is brought to his knees by unpredictable strangeness, where he can no longer rely on his own senses?

Josef Pánek, author of original prose Love in a time of global climate changefor which he won the prestigious Magnesia Litera Award in 2018, comes up with a compelling new novel in which he goes to the extremes of internally conditioned experience and a sharpened experience of the strangeness of the world.

Josef Panek He studied in Prague, lived and worked in Norway and Australia, and now lives in the Czech Republic. In 2013 he published a collection of short stories Opal digger and four years later an amendment Love in a time of global climate change, which has attracted attention thanks to its distinctive style and fresh view of a world that is changing rapidly with the onset of globalisation. A new novel I am their god goes even further in making visible the intensely experienced loss of certainties and existential nakedness.

LUKÁŠ PALÁN

RAW FORM

"The only one who had peace of mind was Egon, because one day he will be president at least, it's clear by how many books he manages to read. I didn't know who the president was now, there was a poster of a tractor hanging above our TV."

When something breaks, it just takes on a different shape, the neighbour on the right used to say. But is this also true when it's not old cups or plates, but an entire community? The story is set in an unnamed village that could lie anywhere, as far as it is typical. Everything is familiar, a bunch of misguided youths shooting airguns at passing cars out of boredom or riding their bikes around the village square, neighborly strife in a village where everyone can see not only into each other's plates but into each other's beds, a pub where regulars sit around and have the kind of talk about the state of the world that could be overheard in any other country pub. But underneath the layer of individual episodes brilliantly removed from "village life", alien, disturbing elements slowly seep in. And while people wait during the endless hot summer for Egon, the only one of the locals who has made it somewhere and regularly brings news from the distant world out there, the atmosphere slowly thickens and the future that is coming seems to take a different, and perhaps very raw, shape.

Lukáš Palán (* 1984) comes from Znojmo, lived in Dublin and Porto, where he opened the English bookshop Trezor and successfully went bankrupt. Ex-bookseller and ex-music journalist. Published in Tamto, Full Moon Magazine, Vice and Dog Wine. He currently works in education and lives in Prague. He has published collections of poetry Pussy, shit, Hitler, Prague (2014) a Loughorn (2016) and the amendment Zero sum (2020). His prose Raw shape is characterized by a raw language, which is characterized by a well-developed sense of literary treatment of the oral tradition and a distinctive black humour. This quirky "rural novel" originally blends elements of naturalism, folk horror and a purely contemporary dystopia.

MAREK TECHNIK

WARNING

It doesn't pay to ignore warnings

Is this a generational conflict, a typical problem of today's divided society, or a conflict of faith and rationality? Jarka Kohoutová and Karolína Mapalová, mother and daughter, both lost their husbands and both have to cope with life after the death of a loved one. The intelligent Karolína rationalises the world to the hilt, while surprisingly often finding herself in the grip of anger and emotion.The emotional Jarka would like to save her daughter from intellectualnihilism, because things around us cannot be grasped by reason alone. When a jovial religious blogger unexpectedly comes between them, she acts as a catalyst in a laboratory experiment and the substances in the compound begin to react violently. The mother thinks her daughter is losing her faith. The daughter thinks the mother is losing her mind. Each is fighting for the other's soul.

"She registers something swirling and pushing inside her insides. An octopus whose tentacles extend from her lower abdomen to somewhere below her solar plexus. Her inner maelstrom, a dynamo of fury with its own flywheel, occasionally affords her the delicious sensation of falling out of role - the freedom of the moment when she gives up all inhibitions, when she is terrifyingly triumphant in her destruction."

Marek Technician is the pseudonym of the author, who was born in 1982 in Olomouc. In 1999, he realized that literature offers the most complex way of representing any human experience. In the MBTI personality test, he is an ENTP, he likes to read catalogues and create
lists, he likes animals and he's a vegetarian. Since 2010 he has been writing critically about film and literature. He lives with his wife in Prague. Novel Warning is his literary debut.

All books will be available for purchase at the event at a bargain price.