Playing Wolf

Goodreads, A Most Anticipated Book

“Deepling unnerving, all the more visceral because we’re left to our imaginations … Horror fiction, at its best, illuminates the darker corners of our nature, the parts we’d rather keep secret or never admit to. Playing Wolf, for all its elisions and upended expectations, never obscures the flawed, conflicted psyches of its main characters.” —Ian Mond, Locus

“What starts as an attempt at healing via nature and small-town values ends up closer to a Bohemian Chainsaw Massacre, albeit without the chainsaws … Zucker also deftly captures the playfulness of Říhová’s text … These types of subtle decisions derive from instinct and experience as much as fluency, and they are part of what makes Zucker such a premier translator … You’ll be both delighted and disturbed.” —Cory Oldweiler, On the Seawall

“A gripping and cinematic English-language debut that blends elements of folk horror, psychological thrillers, and the story of Little Red Riding Hood to stunning effect … Říhová is also a poet, and it shows in the lyrical and atmospheric language of the novel, impressively translated by Alex Zucker. It is a dark beauty, a brutal and violent novel, but one that ensnares.” —Pierce Alquist, BookRiot

“Eloquent and psychologically intense … I couldn’t help but be pulled along for the ride … [a] fantastic psychological horror that exceeded my expectations tenfold.” —Sammy Loree, Bookstr

“A devilishly creepy work of folk horror … A hair-raising tale of a culture clash.” —Publishers Weekly

“Playing Wolf is a fascinating combination of rural creepiness and gruesome fairy tale imagery. Zuzana Říhová’s prose, beautifully translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker, swirls with thoughts, paranoia, dread, and disappointment. You will cringe at the body horror, the wrong turns, the failure of the characters to see the danger before them, to escape the fairy tale they’ve inevitably fallen into. Gripping as it is harrowing!” —Richard Mirabella, author of Brother & Sister Enter the Forest

Zuzana Šťastná studied Czech Language and Literature and Comparative Literature at Charles University in Prague. She has been working at the Institute of Czech Literature since 2007 and was Head of Czech Studies at the University of Oxford from 2014-2017. Šťastná, who has a lifelong interest in Czech avant-garde literature, has published a collection of poetry, I’ll Let You in My House (2016), and a novella, Little Eve (2018), which was named one of the Books of the Year in 2018 by a Czech literary web magazine.

Alex Zucker’s translations include novels by Magdalena Platzová, Jáchym Topol, Bianca Bellová, Petra Hůlová, and Tomáš Zmeškal. He has also translated plays, subtitles, young adult and children’s books, poems, philosophy, art history, and an opera.

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