Adventures of The Good Soldier Svejk During the World War

The Good Soldier Švejk

"I kept thinking: Nobody can be this smart or this stupid. I've gotta decide which way this man is going." - Ruth Cooper

Austrian troops entering the town of Przemysl
during World War I.

Joseph Heller said that
if it weren’t for his having read
The Good Soldier Švejk
he would never had written his American novel Catch-22.

Karel Stroff's 1911 drawing for the precursor story of Švejk.

Cover of the original 1921 issue of the serialized book The Fateful Adventures Of The Good Soldier Švejk, drawn by Josef Lada.

is a truly great satire (perhaps the greatest of them all) on the most central feature of social life in the past century and a half (at least) in most modern industrialized countries—the ubiquitous presence of huge, labyrinthine bureaucratic structures ostensibly set in place to make modern society more efficient, equal, and fair, but, in fact, reducing life for those who have to deal with them to what often amounts to an incomprehensible and out-of-control game whose major players never tire of announcing in noble-sounding prose and stirring poetry the importance of the structure and its alleged purpose but who, in their daily practice, show no signs of any significant humanity in dealing with subordinates or those whom the bureaucracy is supposed to serve. That target is something we all understand (because we have to deal with it, no matter where we live), and thus the impact of this satire extends well beyond the particular social and political realities of the world it depicts.- Ian Johnston

The new English translation
in three volumes:

Choose from two formats:
Paperbacks and Kindle eBooks.

Švejk represents
one of the most unique and successful
survival strategies ever conceived by man.

This Chicago
woman believes you
won't be able to put
the book down, and
here she tells you why:

Over the past few decades Americans have been subjected to some of the same social, political, economic, and moral phenomena that Europeans have endured for ages and which are the backdrop to this icono-clastic and soul probing epic. Now more than ever before, Americans will be able to relate to the story and its main character. And they will enjoy doing it.