A comprehensive guide to the literatures of Central Europe: Poland, The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Former Yugoslavia and Albania.  

Notes

The volume is broken down into eight chapters: Poland, The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Former Yugoslavia and Albania, with each chapter written by an academic specialist in the area under discussion. 

The individual chapters are further broken down into four sections. The first section is both a brief history of the literature and something of a guide for the literary tourist, highlighting cities or areas of each country that are of literary interest. The historical overviews of the various literary traditions are wide-ranging, informative and readable, avoiding the trap of being unnecessarily detailed for a book of this type. 

The second section of each chapter gives a detailed bibliography of English translations of works from each national literature, and the third section is made up of extracts from some of these works. The extracts are no more than a paragraph or two long, but there might be 20 or more extracts to choose from. Each chapter closes with a section containing short biographies of the authors under discussion, varying in length and detail.