Petra Hůlová's The Long Version Exposes How State Money Buys Silence

World Editions has released an excerpt from The Long Version by Petra Hůlová, translated by Alex Zucker, ahead of the 8th annual European Literature Night (ELN 2026) at the Ukrainian Institute of America on Wednesday, October 28 at 6:00 PM ET. The event, presented by the Czech Center New York with EUNIC New York, is free and open to the public.

The excerpt works as a field report from the grant economy of translated fiction. Hůlová's narrator, a Czech writer and lecturer, lays out the mechanics plainly: without state support, no Czech books appear abroad, and even the supported ones often just sit in warehouses. The narrator's Slovenian publisher, Mladinska knjiga, once sent an official statement reporting the sale of four copies of her novel Kratka zgodba Gibanja. "My email thanking them for doing a truly excellent job of hiding my books typically goes unanswered," she notes. Dry, and hard to beat as a verdict on export literature.

How did a Cairo press game the Czech Ministry of Culture?

The sharpest anecdote concerns an Egyptian ex-activist who approached the narrator's agent with an average offer for rights, promising publication with "a cult independent Cairo press, specializing in the finest contemporary foreign prose." Days later, the narrator found the woman's name at the top of a Czech Ministry of Culture spreadsheet, "Translations of Czech Prose Supported in 2018": a translation grant several times above the standard rate. The rights purchase was a pretext for funding. The novel never came out. "As long as the money from the Czech Ministry of Culture went to finance the Cairo alternative scene, why not?" the narrator shrugs. The irony is the whole point.

The excerpt then follows the narrator through her teaching day. Her students ignore a three-part seminar on the Czech underground, a month in preparation with living legends in attendance, but perk up at trivia: a writer who recycles cigarette butts, Kundera's recipe for devil's toast. Her friend David called the seminar plan "criminally naïve" and asked when Czech students last protested anything.

What does the literary scene look like from the inside?

Outside class, David flirts badly with Edita, a student who blushes over his unbuyable novel Earth Above, Sky Below — his publisher Radler pays laughable advances in staggering numbers of complimentary copies that fill his entryway. David has now left Radler for a new publisher, Oto, on the narrator's advice. The two debate whether the artist Irge resents, ignores or actively cultivates the word "scandalous" in the publicity for an upcoming opening — a marketing trick, they agree, at least a century old.

The personal material is spikier. A kebab by the river in Prague; a text from Marie asking when David will be home; the narrator's memory of her marriage to Vladimír, a furnace engineer, which peaked on the day they sold cost-effective heating to their co-op neighbors. Her son Ondřej, sixteen, draws unfinished comics and calls her out. Her daughter Judita answered "shopping" when asked her favorite activity, months before becoming an activist. The narrator bites her tongue, then doesn't: "If I had to choose between her setting herself on fire like Jan Palach or being a mindless consumer…" The sentence stops where it stops.

There is also a literary argument smuggled in: "Dreams are the lamest narrative device you can use," the narrator reflects — and only during her time with David does she let writing intrude on the rest of her life.

The Long Version (World Editions NY LLC, translation copyright © 2026 Alex Zucker, original copyright © 2023 Petra Hůlová) anchors a season in which Czech literature is visibly working the American angle. ELN 2026 will host fourteen award-winning authors from fourteen European countries, with readings, performances and panels moderated by PEN America, organized around four themes: In the Land of Women, Breaking the Mold, Resilience & What the Earth Reveals, and Europe's Haunted Century. For readers who want to know what translation funding actually produces — four copies, sometimes, and an unanswered email — Hůlová's excerpt is the honest ledger.