“Slovak literature appears to be in the midst of a golden age,” (ix) claims Daniel Pratt in the forward to Home and the World in Slovak Writing, a collection of essays concentrating on the writings of Slovak authors after 1989. Like literature from other traditions of the former eastern bloc, Slovak literature has evolved from previous ideological themes and is beginning to include authors from the peripheries and minority groups within Slovakia. A highlight of the collection is its focus on translations into English. As Pratt points out, “Perhaps only the Czech literature of the Prague Spring and normalization could compete with the contemporary case of Slovak literature on the world stage” (x). The book does not attempt a total and comprehensive vision of Slovak literary history but rather a pluralistic vision in which a diversity of interpretations and methodologies takes center stage.

While the bulk of the book focuses on post-1989 Slovak literature, the first two chapters are historical and cover the post-Stalinist liberalization and the decade of transition that followed the Velvet Revolution of 1989. In Ch. 1, Rajendra Chitnis examines the period from 1956 to 1970 and provides background information on works that have appeared in English translation (primarily by Ladislav Mňačko and Dominik Tatarka). Peter Darovec’s “Literature of the Transition” (Ch. 2) looks at the transitional period through the works of Pavel Vilikovský and Peter Pišťanek who, despite the apparent differences in their poetics, treat the problem of national identity and suggest the need to change the traditional myth-building approach to it.

Slovak “autofiction” is the topic of Ivana Taranenkova’s “Writing the Self from Autobiography to Autofiction” (Ch. 3)—that is, the intersections of life writing and fiction in the context of the imperative to privilege the collective over the individual. Zora Pruškova’s complementary chapter “History and Memory: Rewriting the Past” (Ch. 4) examines Slovak historical fiction since 2000 and explores alternatives to official histories that have been suppressed in Slovak literature. She focuses on individual lives and intimate spaces.

Chapters 5 and 6 turn to contemporary Slovak poetry. Viliam Nádaskay in “Poetry and Social Engagement” (Ch. 5) explores how poetry in the 1990s lost its traditional role as moral authority, but in its stead the poetry of the twenty-first century has once again become socially engaged. Ivana Hostova’s “Subversion and Experimentation in Contemporary Slovak Poetry” (Ch. 6) examines the most recent trends in Slovak poetry after 1989. Poets such as Peter Macsovszky and Peter Šulej broke radically with conventional literariness and leaned toward non-traditional writing methods.

In Ch. 7, “Regional Writing and Domestic Inspirations,” Radoslav Passia looks at the contributions of Hungarian, Rusyn, and Roma prose writers, which make up an aspect of Slovak literature that was historically repressed. It is the mixed identity of these regions that produces the particular flavor of these writings.

Émigré writing after 1989 (predominantly women in their 30s) is the focus of Ch. 8 by Tamara Janecová, “Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Writing.” She examines those writers who moved abroad and whose work has not been fully integrated into Slovak literature history. These texts reflect the fragmentation of human identity in response to life abroad. Rafal Majerek examines gender and feminism in “Women’s Writing and Social Change” (Ch. 9) and suggests that women’s writing is assuming a central place in contemporary Slovak literature. He provides an overview of feminism during the post-communist transformation and how it developed especially thanks to the association ASPEKT founded by Jana Juráňová and Jana Cviková in 1993. An autobiographical focus seems to be the most significant feature of contemporary Slovak women’s writing.

“Coda: Translators and Translations” concludes the volume with an essay and an interview. In “Translating Politics and the Politics of Translation,” Magdalena Mullek describes her approach to translating Pavol Rankov’s novel It Happened on the First of September (or Some Other Time) (2008, trans. 2020) as well as considers the contemporary politics of translation and its effect on publishing. An interview with the prolific translator Julia Sherwood rounds out the coda in which she reflects on the challenges and rewards of publishing and promoting translations of contemporary Slovak literature. The volume also includes a useful appendix of Slovak literature in translation.

Finally, Home and the World in Slovak Writing along with Peter Petro’s History of Slovak Literature (1995) and Rejendra Chitnis’s Literature in Post-communist Russia and Eastern Europe (2004), can be seen to comprise a prolegomenon of any further study of Slovak literature in English.