The Long Version
- Author: Petra Hůlová (Czech Republic)
- Book type: Czech novel
- Original: Nejvyšší karta (2023)
- English translation: Alex Zucker
- Publisher: World Editions
- To be released: September 8, 2026
- Length: 218 pages
- Format: paperback / ebook
- Prize: $ 19.99
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Petra Hůlová The Long Version reviews and information
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- “Petra Hůlová is one of the most distinctive and outspoken Czech writers of her generation.” (Project Plume)
Blurb of the novel by Petra Hůlová
In her early fifties, Czech author Sylvie Novak looks back on her successful career. As she embarks on a tour to promote her book of feminist essays—which she’s not convinced has captured the nature of gender inequality—her teenage daughter Judita finds her journals from her youth, discovering the intimate relationship she had with a much older writer. Judita is convinced the experience scarred her for life, whereas Novak considers her daughter’s views to be ignorant and absolutist, however critical she is towards the deep-seated machismo of Eastern European dissident cultures. Meanwhile, the man she loves has found a new, younger object of desire, leaving Novak to reflect on the decline of her sex appeal.
In The Long Version, we become spectators of Novak’s tightrope walk, balancing between the old generation and the new, love and desire, and above all the myriad interpretations of the past. Like Hůlová, Novak seeks not to lay blame or win sympathy, but to explore the shifting meanings of feminism at a time of polarized thinking and, perhaps, discover a path towards reconciliation.
Petra Hůlová was born July 12, 1979 in Prague, Czech Republic. provocative novels, plays, and screenplays have won numerous awards, including the ALTA National Translation Award for Alex Zucker’s translation of her debut novel, All This Belongs to Me, and she is a regular commentator on current events for the Czech press. She studied language, culture, and anthropology at universities in Prague, Ulan Bator, and New York, and was a Fulbright scholar in the USA. Her eight novels and three plays have been translated into thirteen languages. She used to define her writing as “3G”: always working with topics of gender, generations, and geography. Her novels are often narrated in first person and range from intimate confessions to buoyant epic sagas.