Away! Away!

Sometimes running away is the bravest option. Or, so believes Rosa, who ditches her husband and home and takes off on the road. Along the way, she encounters the owner of a puppet theater who’s on a mission to conquer the world with his performance of "The Snow Queen."

Which character from this old fairy tale will Rosa identify with? With Gerda, searching fruitlessly for her lost love? With Kai, who flees home and his beloved one day without a word? Or with the Snow Queen, who seems to stand aloof above it all?

With magnetic, sparkling prose, Beňová delivers a lively mosaic that ruminates on human relationships, our greatest fears and desires."Jana Beňová’s Away! Away! provides laughs of a slightly more satirical, world-weary sort... No surprise—it’s the journey, not the arrival, that matters, and Rosa’s journey is filled with slings and arrows of outrageous Slovakian fortune."
—Bethanne Patrick, Literary Hub

"All our hand-me-down wants are ways of ignoring the fact that one day we’ll die like dogs. Where will we all go, one day? Away. The gift of Beňová’s novel is the omniscient lurch of her prose (a multi-party stream of consciousness). Away! Away! combines its characters’ voices to form a a choral imploration to the reader: sit down and sympathize with these people who make mistakes because they are so afraid of death, the end of the book. People abandon each other because they’re afraid of being pinned down in an identity: locatable, inanimate. Why begrudge them their selfishness on grounds of its absurdity when what they’re up against is even more absurd than that? (Hint: it’s death.)"
—Michael Mungiello, Cleveland Review of Books

"Beňova’s novel riffs on stories old and new, and the means by which we tell and experience them, to bring the reader inside her protagonist’s mind."
—Vol. 1 BrooklynJana Beňová is one of the most acclaimed Slovak authors, and winner of the European Union Prize for Literature. She is a poet and novelist, author of the novels Seeing People Off, Away! Away!, Parker, and Honeymoon, as well as three collections of poems. Though her work has been widely translated throughout Europe, Seeing People Off was her first book to be translated to English.

Janet Livingstone was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and ventured to Czechoslovakia just after the 1989 Velvet Revolution. Among her full-length book translations are Master your Stage Fright by Slovak master violinist, Bohdan Warchal and Piata loď (Boat Number Five) by novelist Monika Kompaníková, which was one of three finalists for the EBRD Literature Prize 2022, one of the few international literature prizes which recognizes both author and translator equallly. In addition to Jana Beňová, her current translation projects include the novels The Best of All Worlds by Slovak-Swiss author Irena Brežná and The Arab World—Another Planet? by Emire Khidayer. Janet lives in Seattle with her two children.