Selection from the forthcoming books

Eva Kuminková

Title in Engllish: Traditions – Transformations – Identity. Folk costume and dance in Wallachia as a source of inspiration

The ethnologist Eva Kuminková in her publication contributes to transdisciplinary discussion on evolution and transformations of folk culture. She focuses on processes, which despite all kinds of obstacles, historical and political twists, cultural and social changes allowed different elements of folk culture survive all the way to the 21st century. She uses folk costume and male dance odzemek from the ethnographic region of Wallachia in context of their development since the 19th century as case studies. The author strives to analyse the significance of these two elements in the process of formation of local and regional identity. She also studies the role of people, who are custodians of contemporary traditions, institutions and individuals, who have been contributing to understanding, safeguarding and transmission of this cultural heritage. In her conclusion she formulates universal preconditions which allow the above mentioned processes and explains to what extend folk culture can serve as a source of collective and personal identity of an individual.

To be published in December 2025

Jan Reichstäter

The book offers analytical insights into the pre-Christian religions of the northern Indo-Europeans, meaning the Celtic, Germanic and Baltic peoples. In three thematic chapters, the author presents, through the perspectives of archaeology, philology, and ethnology, a critical synthesis of current knowledge about the pantheons, rituals, and mythologies that once formed the ‘pillars’ of these religious cultures. In addition to the possibilities of reconstructing these systems, rejected by their adherents in late antiquity or in the Middle Ages with the adoption of Christianity, he attentively addresses the ambiguities, complexities, and challenges of interpreting their particular structures or elements. Through this balanced combination of logical constructivism and critical deconstruction, the book provides the reader with credible outlines of the archaic traditions that influenced – as a substratum legacy – not only Western Christianity, but also the subsequent secularised cultures of northern Europe.

To be published in December 2025

Siddhartha Mukherjee

“In an account that’s both lyrical and capacious, Mukherjee takes us through an evolution of human understanding: from the seventeenth-century Discovery that humans are made up of cells to our cutting-edge technologies for manipulating and deploying cells for therapeutic purposes.” – The New Yorker

“Tying together what might otherwise be a disjointed narrative, Mukherjee frequently invokes the patient’s journey. We hear their voices throughout, reminding the reader that however great our knowledge, there is still much to learn… A great read with which it is hard not to hum along.” – Marie Vodicka, Science

Named a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by The Economist, Oprah Daily, BookPage, Book Riot, the New York Public Library, and more!

A gripping new story from the American oncologist, scientist and writer, well known to Czech readers thanks to translations of his earlier important works The Emperor of All Maladies. A Biography of Cancer (2015) and The Gene. An Intimate History (2019), published by Munipress.

Mukherjee begins this magnificent story in the late 1600s, when a distinguished English polymath, Robert Hooke, and an eccentric Dutch cloth-merchant, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked down their handmade microscopes. What they saw introduced a radical concept that swept through biology and medicine, touching virtually every aspect of the two sciences, and altering both forever. It was the fact that complex living organisms are assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units. Our organs, our physiology, our selves – hearts, blood, brains – are built from these compartments. Hooke christened them “cells.”

The discovery of cells – and the reframing of the human body as a cellular ekosystém – announced the birth of a new kind of medicine based on the therapeutic manipulations of cells. A hip fracture, a cardiac arrest, Alzheimer’s dementia, AIDS, pneumonia, lung cancer, kidney failure, arthritis, COVID pneumonia – all could be reconceived as the results of cells, or systems of cells, functioning abnormally. And all could be perceived as loci of cellular therapies.

Filled with writing so vivid, lucid, and suspenseful that complex science becomes thrilling, The Song of the Cell tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans. Told in six parts, and laced with Mukherjee’s own experience as a researcher, a doctor, and a prolific reader, The Song of the Cell is both panoramic and intimate – a masterpiece on what it means to be human.

“In an account both lyrical and capacious, Mukherjee takes us through an evolution of human from the seventeenth-century discovery that humans are made up of cells to our cutting-edge technologies for manipulating and deploying cells for therapeutic purposes” (The New Yorker).

To be published in autumn 2025

Book preview