"If you can read [ God's Fool] without being astonished and touched, then you'd better check to see if your heart is made of stone…simply brilliant. A book of the year." — Dallas Morning NewsBorn attached at the chest, Chang and Eng were considered a marvel, an act of God. By any standard, theirs is a history of epic variety and drama. Mark Slouka recounts their tumultuous story, from the docks of Vietnam to American fame, with intimacy and compas...

"Relentlessly observant, miraculously expressive, these [stories] see through the mirrored surface into a hidden yet strangely intimate world." — New York Times Book ReviewSet in a tiny Czech community on the shores of Lost Lake, these stories chronicle three generations of men and women under the spell of a landscape with a powerful history. Mark Slouka explores both the quiet glory of the natural world and the mysterious motions of the human spirit....

"A vibrantly told love story" with tragic roots in WWII Czechoslovakia ( The Washington Post).An American-born son of Czech immigrants grows up in postwar New York, part of a boisterous community of the displaced where he learns fragments of European history, Czech fairy tales, and family secrets gleaned from overheard conversations. Central in his young imagination is the heroic account of the seven Czech parachutists who, in 1942, assassinated a high-ran...

Jon, Ray, Frank e Karen, come dire avere diciassette anni a Brewster, cittadina operaia nello Stato di New York, nell’America di fine anni Sessanta. Un’amicizia vera, spontanea, a tratti disperata, unisce i quattro compagni di liceo, che sognano di riscattarsi dalle miserie delle proprie vite, da famiglie troppo poco disposte ad amarli. A un’età in cui tutto sembra possibile, anche nell’orizzonte limitato di Brewster, i protagonisti cercano una via di salvezza: Ray nell’amore per il fratel...

A searing, poignantly rendered collection of stories chronicling the lives of ordinary people battling the forces of love and loss, from "one of the great unsung writers of our time" (Colum McCann).In fifteen beautifully wrought stories—ranging from occupied Czechoslovakia to California's Central Valley to the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest—Mark Slouka explores moments in life when our back is to the wall. One of the most forceful American writers of his gene...

"I have never before read anything except Nabokov’s Speak, Memory that so relentlessly and shrewdly exhausted the kindness and cruelty of recollection’s shaping devices." —Geoffrey WolffBorn in Czechoslovakia, Mark Slouka’s parents survived the Nazis only to have to escape the Communist purges after the war. Smuggled out of their own country, the newlyweds joined a tide of refugees moving from Innsbruck to Sydney to New York, dragging with them a history o...

Born attached at the chest, Chang and Eng were considered a marvel, an omen, an act of God, evidence of His glory or proof of His wrath. Uniquely cursed, enslaved to one another for life, they were a joke of nature variously feared and abhorred, disturbing our most basic assumptions about the human condition. Mark Slouka’s dazzling achievement in God’s Fool is the ease and compassion with which he draws the story of one human being from this ghastly predicament. Looking beyond the...

"Intense and elegiac…devastatingly agile." — New York Times Book ReviewThe year is 1968. The world is changing, and sixteen-year-old Jon Mosher is determined to change with it. Racked by guilt over his older brother's childhood death and stuck in the dead-end town of Brewster, New York, he turns his rage into victories running track. Meanwhile, Ray Cappicciano, a rebel as gifted with his fists as Jon is with his feet, is trying to take care of his baby bro...

'My mother knew a man during the war. Theirs was a love story, and like any good love story, it left blood on the floor and wreckage in its wake.' As a boy growing up in New York, the narrator's parents' memories of their Czech homeland seem to belong to another world, as distant and unreal as the fairy tales his father tells him. It is only as an adult, when he makes his own journey to Prague, that he is finally able to piece together the truth of his parents' past: what they did, whom hi...

As an infant, Jon Mosher tragically lost his older brother to a freak accident - something that could have happened to any family. There's nothing he could have done to prevent it, but there it is anyway, that loss echoing in every room and painted on the faces of his parents - German Jews who'd escaped the war - as if to say: you weren't, and aren't, enough. Saddled with this absence, Jon's life has been defined by what's missing and what he lacks; that is, until in high school h...

Mark Slouka’s novel begins with the child of Czech immigrants to the US, now living in New York, who has been brought up on the folklore of his parents’ homeland. As he grows up he becomes aware that he has never been told what his parents did during the Nazi occupation of Prague. As an adult he makes a journey back to Czechoslovakia and it is only then that he discovers their part in the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the notorious ‘butcher of Prague’ and begins to understand his mot...