Philip Roth’s Writers from the Other Europe was a Penguin paperback series he launched and served as general editor for, beginning in the mid-1970s and running until 1989. Its goal was to bring major Eastern European fiction to American readers, especially writers who were well known in their own countries but little known in the U.S.
His interest in the series grew out of visits to Prague in 1972 and 1973. He was deeply moved by the plight of writers living under totalitarian regimes—authors who were often banned, imprisoned, or forced into menial labor while their work circulated only in samizdat (underground) form.
Roth envisioned a series that would move beyond political curiosity and highlight these authors as literary masters rather than mere political dissidents. The series focused on the "Eastern Bloc," primarily featuring writers from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. The books were known for their distinctive paperback covers, which often featured evocative, somber artwork that mirrored the psychological depth of the prose.
The Penguin series eventually published 17 titles, including works by Milan Kundera, Ludvík Vaculík, Bruno Schulz, Danilo Kiš, Bohumil Hrabal, Tadeusz Borowski, Jerzy Andrzejewski, Géza Csáth, Tadeusz Konwicki, and György Konrád. Roth also commissioned introductions from major writers and intellectuals such as Carlos Fuentes, Joseph Brodsky, Angela Carter, Czesław Miłosz, John Updike, and others, giving the books literary and historical framing.
The series helped establish several now-canonical writers in the English-speaking world and influenced later authors and readers interested in translated literature. It also became a model of how a general editor can shape a literary canon through translation, introductions, and selective framing. Bruno Schulz in particular gained much wider attention through the series, and later writers and critics continued to cite it as an important gateway to Central and Eastern European literature.
I was introduced to the series with Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles because it was adapted by the Quay Brothers into a brilliant stop-motion film of the same name
The Series
Here is the full list of the 17 books in Philip Roth’s Writers from the Other Europe series, along with brief notes on each author’s background. The series ran from 1974 to 1989 and focused on major Eastern and Central European writers who were little known to American readers at the time. I’ve highlighted my favorite authors.
Jerzy Andrzejewski — Polish novelist and screenwriter, best known in English for Ashes and Diamonds, a postwar political novel later adapted into a major film.
Tadeusz Borowski — Polish writer and Holocaust survivor, famous for stark, unsparing camp stories gathered in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Géza Csáth — Hungarian writer, critic, and physician whose stories are marked by psychological intensity and morbidity.
Witold Gombrowicz — Polish novelist and playwright, an iconoclast of modern Polish literature, known for absurdism and anti-formalism.
Bohumil Hrabal — Czech author celebrated for lyrical, comic, and deeply human fiction about ordinary life under pressure.
Danilo Kiš — Yugoslav/Serbian writer of Jewish and Montenegrin background, noted for formally inventive, historically haunted fiction.
György Konrád — Hungarian novelist and essayist, a major dissident intellectual who wrote about bureaucracy, power, and civic life.
Tadeusz Konwicki — Polish novelist and filmmaker whose work often reflects war, memory, and disillusionment.
Milan Kundera — Czech-born novelist whose work blends political satire, eroticism, and philosophical reflection.
Bruno Schulz — Polish-Jewish writer and artist, now regarded as one of the most original prose stylists of the 20th century.
Ludvík Vaculík — Czech writer and dissident, associated with the reform-era and post-1968 political literature.
Milan Kundera — Laughable Loves.
Milan Kundera — The Joke.
Milan Kundera — The Farewell Party.
Milan Kundera — The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
George Konrád — The Case Worker.
George Konrád — The City Builder.
Roth’s series dismantled the Western perception that Eastern European literature was purely "socialist realism" or dry political protest, instead revealing a world of surrealism, dark irony, and profound existentialism. The "Other Europe" writers profoundly influenced Western authors (including Roth himself), who found in these works a "seriousness" and a high-stakes relationship between the individual and the state that felt missing from contemporary American fiction.
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Sources:
Neglected Books
article on the series.
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