The first ever English collection of stories by Johannes Urzidil - a friend of Kafka and an unjustly overlooked writerA maid who is unexpectedly bequeathed her employers' worldly possessions when they flee the Nazi occupation; a loyal bank clerk, who falls into troublesome love with a portrait; a middle-aged travel agent, who is perhaps the least well-travelled man in town; a widowed villager, whose 'magnetic' twelve-year-old daughter witnesses a disturbing event; and a tiny village thrown into civil war by the disappearance of a cheesecake. These stories, about the tremendous upheaval which occurs when the ordinary encounters the unexpected, are stunningly told, with both humour and humanity.This is the first ever English publication of these Bohemian tales, by one of the great overlooked writers of the twentieth century.