The Israeli-American writer, journalist and playwright (born 1957) will present The Lies They Tell, an unusually witty and simultaneously alarming exploration of the contemporary US. The book, though it was written before Donald Trump’s victory, explores the roots of today’s political transformations in the US, the disconnect between the liberal coasts and the rest of the country and incredibly widespread anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel, as well as the US’s hypocritical stance toward blacks. In the book Tenenbom criss-crosses the country, posing clever, seemingly naïve questions in conversations with hundreds of people to compose a picture that has left many both entertained and astonished. Tenenbom is neither of the left nor of the right but is essentially seeking the truth. In so doing he annoys all and sundry.

Tuvia Tenenbom will present The Lies They Tell in person.

Introduced by Daniel Anýž and Jan Pergler (publishers Zeď).

Interpretation into Czech provided.

The book represents a loose continuation of the author’s successful book Exotem na této zemi (Oddball on This Earth). Stories from Heryán’s rich life filled with meetings with multifarious people from all social classes are intermingled with his work as a minister and interpretations of biblical passages. The connecting leitmotiv is the theme of divine munificence, the awareness of which leads one to joy, freedom and a desire to contribute to it by serving others.

Hosted by Kateřina Kokešová.

Ladislav Heryán and Miroslav Mirga will play guitar and sing.

Václav Havel can be credited with one of Filip Topol’s first performances, when the singer performed before the Plastic People of the Universe at Hrádeček. At the same time, the lyrics and music of his band Psí vojáci are filled with heart, rawness and emotion and appeal to young people even today. The exhibition Music on the Canvas, held on the day of the 38th anniversary of Psí vojáci’s debut concert at the Prague Jazz Days festival, presents pictures by the young artist Sára Svobodová inspired by the band’s songs and significant moments in their story. The show offers visitors a unique opportunity to share the artist’s feelings while listening to particular songs on MP3 players located by each picture.

Veterans of that time, drummer David Skála and manager Romek Hanzlík, will speak about Psí vojáci.

The band Kopyrajt will perform and Hana Řičicová will serve as compere.

Organised by the Václav Havel Library in cooperation with the College of Media and Journalism.

In his early youth he had a particular conception of reality, an “idea of wholeness”, that later also became his mission. He was obsessed with expressing this idea and devoted nearly 30 years to exploring it, while he graduated in classical philology and philosophy, completed a law degree and began working. Gomá decided to process all of these inner feelings philosophically in a field he dubs literature, summing this work up as a “tetralogy of exemplariness”. From Gomá’s perspective, the four books are a chapter of a single internal creed, an attempt to achieve two goals: to arrive at individuality in this world and at the same time, against all experience, to nurture hopes of maintaining that individuality even beyond our world, in any place and at any time. Gomá’s central thesis is a worldly philosophy: about everything, for everything and with the utmost grace.

The debate with Javier Gomá will be chaired by Michael Žantovský while the evening will be introduced by His Excellency Pedro Calvo-Sotelo Ibáñez-Martín, Spain’s Ambassador to Prague.

Simultaneous interpretation from Spanish provided.

Pech has to date published the short story collections Napíšu Pavle (I’ll Write to Pavla) and Ohromně vtipná videa (Enormously Funny Videos). Their books are unsentimental and unvarnished, credible and dramatic. While Pech’s Cobainovi žáci (Cobain’s Pupils), issued by publishers Argo, speaks for hundreds or thousands of today’s post-beatniks and hipsters, Faulerová’s debut Lapače prachu (The Dust Catchers), published by Torst, features a purely individual testimony. Both writers’ protagonists are lost, each for a different reason. The first stumbles under the influence of the “blurry” age, wants to become a rock star and makes wisecracks in a druggy haze; the second withdraws from a dysfunctional family while still getting involved in interpersonal battles filled with traps and landmines. Both have problems with their own identity and are trying to find themselves. Pech’s hero is trying to get somewhere and following his dreams. Faulerová’s heroine has never thought anything of herself and vehemently resists any kind of inclusion.

Jáchym Topol will present and Kateřina Šedá will help launch the debut.

Hosted by Jiří Brabec and Jan Šulc.

Visitors will witness a public dress rehearsal helmed by director Jaroslava Šiktancová, head of the theatre acting third year programme. Another of the faculty’s students, playwright Tomáš Loužný, winner of the Václav Havel Library Foundation NY’s literary contest, will put on his play Hosté (The Guests), directed by Loužný and Barbora Maškovizová, with his classmates.

Jiří Jírů, who was a Václav Havel´s personal photographer till 2000, developed an international reputation as a photographer for such major publications as Time, Newsweek, Business Week, People, Fortune, The New York Times, International Herald Tribune. Frank Tomas Grapl, a “Maoriavian” with Czech roots, and the Whakaari Rotorua troupe from the Land of the Long White Cloud (NZ) will discuss Václav Havel’s visit to the Maori.

A projection of photographs documenting the visit to a Maori village in Rotorua will be accompanied by an explanation of the context and cultural links, which are little known to Czechs. The Whakaari Rotorua will also perform Maori songs and the traditional haka dance, which has been made world famous as a pre-game ritual of New Zealand’s All Blacks rugby team. The most famous haka is entitled Ka mate, or “death will come one day but now I am alive”.

Programme hosted by Kristina Maková.

The monograph being presented outlines the broader background to the latest Russian aggression and provides an analysis of developments in Ukraine relating to the current armed conflict since 2014. The main causes and the course of the Russian hybrid military campaign, along with the impact of the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war on today’s international order, will be discussed by Jan Šír, Karel Svoboda and Luboš Švec from the Institute of International Studies’ Department of Russian and Eastern European Studies, David Svoboda from the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes and journalist Jefim Fištejn from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Chaired by Ondřej Kundra from the weekly Respekt.

An accompanying publication contains portraits of the fates of 12 Czechoslovaks and their family members, friends and colleagues. Inconvenient to the regime or entirely innocent, frequently randomly selected people, they found themselves caught up in an insatiable juggernaut of the Soviet regime in the form of the Gulag system of connected labour camps. The text is supplemented by extensive period images and contemporary photographs of places where the Gulag once stood, which will be projected during the evening.

The book will be presented by the authorial trio of Adam Hradilek, Jan Dvořák and Jaroslav Formánek from the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes.

The initial spur for this development was the “Eyewitness” Literary Reporting Prize, named after an anonymous 17th century Cossack chronicle and run for six years by the Kiev publishing house Tempora. One of its jurors is a writer well-known to Czechs, Ukraine, Scale 1:1 author Oleh Kryshtopa.

Discussing contemporary reporting will be Olesja Jaremčuk and Les Belej, two writers whose work has been published in Czech in the magazines NaVýchod and Plav.

Hosted by Radko Mokryk. Interpretation by Alexej Sevruk.

The event is part of the accompanying programme to the International Conference of Ukrainian Studies Experts in Prague entitled “Ukraine as a cultural and historical narrative (language, history, literature)”.

Padá mi to z nebe (It Falls to Me from Heaven) is a book of interviews with nun Angelika Pintířová of the Congregation of Sisters of Mercy of St. Charles Borromeo conducted by journalists Tomáš Kutil and Jan Paulas. Sister Angelika straddles the world of the media, youth detention centres and theatre. She belongs to both the secular world and the cloistered community and enriches both universes.

How can a nun survive in a borstal? How does one examine a president? How should faith be discussed in today’s world? How was entering a secret order under the communists? Can a nun watch the ice hockey world championships, drink beer and be active on Facebook? Or even have her own radio show and be friendly with top sports people?

Angelika Pintířová answers these and more questions in the book-long interview. As well as pressing issues of the day, such as the decline in familial relationships, the legacy of communism in us and the education of juvenile delinquents, she also discusses her own life story. It includes a happy village childhood, amateur theatre, the secret life of a nun under communism, acting studies, travels to Siberia and riding a scooter. It is the story of a nun on whom challenges of all kinds of have always fallen from the heavens. And she has taken them up!

Sister Angelika will perform her own songs.

Helena Frischerová, who left with her husband to work in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, was the model for Ri Gustavovna, the protagonist of Jiří Weil’s 1937 cautionary novel Moskva–hranice (Moscow-Border). In the year that Weil’s book came out Frischerová became, like many foreigners living in the USSR, a victim of the Great Terror. She was sentenced to a decade in corrective labour camps in northern Russia while her husband was executed. She wrote her memoires of her time in the Gulag, stylised in an urgent second person, in Russia in the 1960s. She never returned to Czechoslovakia and died in Moscow surrounded by friends from the camps.

The story of Helena Frischerová and her memoires will be introduced by Alena Machoninová, author of the foreword to the Czech edition. Marie Štípková will read excerpts from the book.

New York native Alex Zucker originally studied zoology and appeared headed for a career as a marine biologist. However, a visit to Prague shortly before the Velvet Revolution became a turning point in his life and he soon learned Czech and embarked on a career as a literary translator. Today he is one of the most prolific Czech to English translators and has won numerous awards for his translations. He has introduced Anglophone readers to the work of writers such as Magdalena Platzová, Tomáš Zmeškal, Patrik Ouředník, Jáchym Topol and Petra Hůlová, whose Three Plastic Rooms, translated by Alex, is coming out this November. How is contemporary Czech literature faring in the big, mercilessly competitive world of literature in English? Writer Jáchym Topol will conduct the debate with his translator.

Alex Zucker is visiting Prague for a Czech Literary Centre residential stay.