Lovers for a Day: New and Collected Stories on Love

Ivan Klima has been called a “Czech genius” by the Los Angeles Times Book Review. In these stories spanning his long career from the 1960s to the present, he gives us a gallery of people searching, in love, for escape: factory girls on their day off and assembly-line workers lost in Walter-Mittyesque fantasies; a young woman on a honeymoon with the man she did not marry; a divorce-court judge whose mistress cannot understand his affection for the routines of his marriage; a young wife who falls into a passionate affair with an elderly bookbinder crippled by war. Lovers for a Day is a book stamped with Klima’s unique wisdom, a personal history of a national evolution and an acute and moving examination of our attempts to find freedom in love. “Ivan Klima’s view of love is often witty, sometimes playful, and has a convincing sense of the erotic….[and] the kindness that can endure between a husband and wife long after the passion has fled.” — Andrew Miller, The New York Times Book Review; “Klima has evolved differently from his contemporaries…. Rather than become embittered by his country’s past, Klima has come to a truce with imperfection — the imperfection of history and of love.” — Jennie Yabroff, San Francisco Chronicle