Praise for A Contribution to the History of Joy "Radka Denemarková is one of the most provocative, political and at the same time one of the most poetic authors of the present, as she proves in her novel A Contribution to the History of Joy ." --Jury, Spycher Leuk Literature Award 2019 "Radka Denemarková lives up to her reputation as the Czech Republic's "Elfriede Jelinek" with her novel A Contribution to the History of Joy .she is the great taboo-breaker and thematic setter of contemporary Czech literature." --Andreas Breitenstein, NZZ "What begins as a crime thriller soon turns out to be a socially critical novel: Radka Denemarková's A Contribution to the History of Joy examines the asymmetrical relationship between the sexes in a virtuoso narrative act." --Alexandra Millner, Die Presse "Rape is a difficult subject for a novel, but Denemarková can handle it. She is as tenacious as a bulldog. Once she sinks her teeth into her set themes, she persists with them until she has told all that needs to be told." --Klára Kubícková, MF DNES "The crime thriller is only a pretext for brilliantly crafted and intricately ramified reflections on universal violence against women, from Nazi crimes in Poland to mass rape in India and forced prostitution of minors in the Czech Republic.
" --Franz Hass, NZZ "Cruelly unforgiving, but far from heartless, heavily metaphorical, but far from hamfisted, formally perfect, but far from futilely formalistic. Radka Denemarková's new prose work, A Contribution to the History of Joy , is an admirable work, a small miracle of literature." --Katerina Kirkosová, h7o.cz "Radka Denemarková has succeeded in presenting a disturbing, highly political, and at the same time poetically condensed novel." --Veronika Schuchter, Die Furche "It is a book that boldly combines several genres: historical narrative, detective fiction, and psychological study. Added to all this is a distinctive, very free use of language, which links Denemarková to the great masters of Central European literature, such as Bruno Schulz or even Nabokov." --José Martínez Praise for Radka Denemarková "Radka Denemarková's literature is a magic mirror." --Olga Tokarczuk "I believe that Radka Denemarková has earned herself a place among Nobel Prize-worthy authors.
" --Daniela Strigl, ORF Ö1 Ex libris.