Karel CApek (1890-1938) is generally considered the greatest Czech author of the first half of this century and one of the great world authors between the wars. This volume includes a selection of Capek’s best plays (including R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), stories, columns, and essays, all newly translated or modernized and corrected. In his uniquely humorous meditations on mortality and commitment, on people’s failures to understand, Capek searched for the root, or the radical center, of our contradictions and mysteries.