Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders

Written in 1935 during the height of Czech Surrealism but not published until a decade later, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a strange and erotic fable tracing a young girl’s unsettling passage into womanhood, set in motion by her first menstruation. Drawing on the Gothic tradition—Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, K. H. Mácha’s May, and F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu—Nezval weaves a phantasmagoric tale using the melodramatic tone of pulp serials. The result is a haunting, dreamlike narrative filled with vampires who crave chicken blood, deceptive changelings, corrupt priests, and an aging grandmother obsessed with regaining her youth.

The novel occupies a space between fairy tale and Gothic horror, contemplating themes of innocence and decay, desire and mortality. It dissolves boundaries—between brother and sister, gender and genre—unfolding through surreal shifts in language and tone that typify the Czech avant-garde.

This edition includes Kamil Lhotak's original illustrations.