Original Czech literature is being written, but its impact is much weaker than it used to be under communism, when it substituted politics. Petr Bílek, Professor of Czech Literature at Charles University in Prague, divides the history of Czech literature in the post-communist era into three stages. During stage one, in the early 1990s, the book market was flooded by hundreds of titles, previously banned under communism. It was very difficult for the reading public to absorb all these works at once, especially since they suddenly seemed irrelevant in the new era. Thus readers became quickly bored with these old books. In stage two, people were impatiently expecting great new literary talents to appear in freedom, but these expectations were disappointed. Thereafter came stage three, still current, when literature has become the subject of media manipulation. This is, in Bílek´s view, the culture of ' one day wonders ' : newspapers and magazines discover a ' unique new literary talent ' , build up its reputation to celebrity status and within a few weeks the writer is forgotten. To be fair, there are Czech post-communist writers worth mentioning and reading. Jáchym Topol (b. 1962), whose character and writing talent have been shaped by the underground culture in the communist era, produced in his novel Sestra (1994, published in English as City, Sister, Silver , 2000 ) a hard-hitting, psychedelic account of the destabilising chaos, experienced in the early 1990s by members of his generation after the regime change. Michal Ajvaz (b. 1949) is an author of a number of complex, postmodern narratives, written in a characteristic style ( Druhé město , The Second City, 1993 , Tyrkysový orel, The Turquiose Eagle, 1997). Ajvaz´s texts are associated with profound philosophical reflection. Michal Viewegh (b. 1962), the only contemporary Czech author who makes a living from his writing, is the author of more than twenty highly popular, as he calls them self- deprecatingly, ' commercial ' novels, reminiscent of work such as Sex in the City or the Bridget Jones Diaries , which deal, often in a comic and ironic style, with the life of the yuppie generation in today´s Czech Republic. Viewegh often uses various postmodernist tricks with different levels of the narrative and various meta-narratives. His work has been translated into more than a dozen European languages, although very little of it has been published in English. Perhaps the most interesting contemporary author, certainly if we look for authors who are capable of capturing the ethos and value system of current Czech society, is Emil Hakl (b. 1958). His novels and short stories ( O rodičích a dětech , 2002, published in English as Of Kids and Parents , 2008, and O létajících objektech , Of Flying Objects, 2004, probe the nature of human relationships against the background of the traumatising events of modern Central European history and within the feeling of discomfort produced by the experience of living in the Czech Republic today. But it is Czech cinema rather than literature which has experienced a real flowering since the fall of communism. Some three hundred Czech feature films have been made over the past twenty years;

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