A glimpse into the world of young people, modern nomads, roving in search of a new and promising life.

The Moon in Foil traces the stories of Petra, Natália, Anka, Mika, Juliana, and Jackie as they go out into the world in search of a better life—or maybe just a different one. In post-communist Europe, they have the freedom to study and work in places their parents couldn’t even have visited—Paris, London, Helsinki, and Budapest. But the reality of that “freedom,” they soon discover, is often nothing more than tedious work and poor living conditions. From close looks at the work of a housekeeper at a French hotel, a bartender at an Irish pub, a snowboarding instructor in Slovakia in the winter and an office worker in London in the summer, and a programmer in Helsinki, to explorations of larger topics such as marriage, divorce, and relationships, Zuska Kepplová’s novel is a millennials’ odyssey—a search for the self by the post–Cold War generation.

Stories that entwine the mundane with the mystical, written by a cult favorite Slovakian writer.

An unhappily married woman is impregnated by her elderly neighbor who lives in a building across the street and with whom she has never had any physical contact. Just as his attention creates life within her, his own life waxes and wanes with her gaze and attention.

A man finds himself trapped in a pub on a sweltering afternoon after refusing to buy a beer with his cigarettes. Guarded by a vigilante bartender and his beer-obsessed patrons, his every attempt at escape is foiled until their life-giving elixir, the beer, runs out.

This collection introduces English-language readers to the work of Dušan Mitana, a cult figure in contemporary Central European literature. In Mitana’s stories, appearing in English for the first time, the rational and the irrational are indistinguishable. His tales infect a banal, quotidian realism with mystical and supernatural distortions. Tinged with Hitchcockian paranoia and full of unexpected turns, the seventeen stories collected here offer a glimpse into Mitana’s trademark absurdist style.

Set in Slovakia, a revealing narrative about contemporary society.

An accidental pregnancy, a good-looking man who cares about no one but himself, marriage because the man “had a bit of a Christian upbringing,” divorce—that is the trajectory of Pipina’s life, leading to single motherhood and a thousand cruelties of everyday life because she is an ugly woman in a world where ugliness is worse than a death sentence. At every turn, she is reminded of her inferiority. She can’t wait for the end of each day when she can sit in the stairwell outside of her dilapidated apartment and retreat into her thoughts. Her drab life full of indignities dissolves only in her beautiful, cinematic dreams. In them, she experiences whatever she can’t do or have in real life. She creates a rich inner world, and her razor-sharp observations, interlaced with a good dose of humor, produce a revealing narrative about contemporary society. In the first English translation of her work, the brilliant Slovak author Zuzana Cigánová pulls back the veil on people’s most private thoughts—thoughts that could very much be our own.