About the Author

KAREL HYNEK MACHA was born on November 16, 1810 in an old part of Prague where his father was the foreman at one of the city's mills. At school he learned Latin and German, the two languages approved by the Habsburg authorities, and later studied law at Prague University. His great model was Byron, with whom he shared a romantic idealism, wandering the Bohemian countryside to visit castle ruins, always making sketches and notes describing the natural beauty surrounding him. He also walked the length of Moravia and Slovakia as well as making a journey to Venice on foot. Much influenced by the Czech intellectuals who were trying to revive the language at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Macha wrote May and many of his poems in Czech (though his early writing was in German, the compulsory language of his education). Macha died of pneumonia just shy of his 26th birthday in 1836. He was to have been married a week earlier in Prague to the mother of his son, but did not show up due to his illness. Buried in a pauper's grave in Litomerice, his remains were exhumed in March 1939, as Nazi German was occupying the country, and given a formal state burial at Prague's Slavin Cemetery on Vysehrad among the great Czech dead. In addition to May, Macha in his short life wrote a number of poems, short prose sketches, and a journal where he explicitly describes his sexual encounters with his wife to-be, Lori. MARCELA SULAK is Assistant Professor of Literature at American University. Her poetry has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, including Fence, Indiana Review, Notre Dame Review, Spoon River Review, Quarterly West, and River Styx.

Reviews

"In the hunt for the sensational sellers, the original and unique is forgotten, in short, what is even today the life-blood of literature: the independently creative artist and the independently publishing publisher, who sees it as his noblest task to discover works of value and publish them... Such is the Prague-based English-language publisher Twisted Spoon Press. - WEEKENDAVISEN, Copenhagen Twisted Spoon Press will be an influential step in re-establishing an international literary tradition in Prague absent for some 50 years. - CENTRAL EUROPEAN BUSINESS WEEKLY"