''City Sister Silver'' is the title of Alex Zucker's English-language translation of the 1994 novel ''Sestra'' by Czech author Jáchym Topol, published by Catbird Press in 2000. The Czech original was described by Czech writer Ivan Klíma as "a first attempt at expressing, in a profound and extremely individual way, the feelings of an entire generation," with the central character Potok in a sense embodying the simultaneous feelings of alienation and enormous possibilities of a young adult at the time of the Velvet Revolution and its aftermath. This is a complex, frequently dark, and often deliberately confusing, novel, with the English translation described by Samuel Thomas as "a difficult experience for a reader unfamiliar with Czech culture utbeautiful

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and consistently inventive." Samuel Thomas: "City Sister Silver," in ''

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die ''1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die'' is a literary reference book compiled by over one hundred literary critics worldwide and edited by Peter Boxall, Professor of English at Sussex University, with an introduction by Peter Ackroyd. Each ti ...

'' (London: Quintet Publishing, 2006), p. 838. By all accounts, the Czech original is no less challenging or inventive, with

Topol Topol may refer to: Missiles * RT-2PM Topol, a Russian intercontinental ballistic missile in service from 1985 * RT-2PM2 Topol-M, a Russian intercontinental ballistic missile in service from 1997 People * Topol (surname) * Chaim Topol, Israeli a ...

making the most of new freedoms to play fast and loose with the conventional rules of written Czech, to the extent that the original was issued with a disclaimer stating the author's intent to "capture language in its unsystematicness and out-of-jointness."Alex Zucker, Translator's Preface, in ''City Sister Silver'' (North Haven, CT: Catbird Press, 2000), p. vii.

Footnotes

1994 Czech novels Novels set in Czechoslovakia {{1990s-novel-stub