This research monograph examines presidential constitutional conventions and the role they play in the political systems of four Central European countries – the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland. As primarily unwritten rules of constitutional practice, constitutional conventions represent political arrangements and as such are political in origin. Not only this, constitutional conventions, in general, and presidential constitutional conventions, in particular, have signi�cant political implications. They shape both the everyday operation and character of regimes. Central Europe represents a particularly useful example on which this role of constitutional conventions can be studied and assessed.

Prague-born Karel Michal (1932-84) lived a significant part of his adult life under Czechoslovakia's oppressive communist regime. Prevented from studying at the university as a young man, he fruitlessly cycled through a number of professions before finally turning to writing in the early 1960s. Michal's works--which include detective fiction, historical novels, short stories, and screenplays--offer a Kafkaesque perspective on the mechanism of the absurd and argue for substantial reinterpretation of the concept of ordinary life under a totalitarian regime.
With "Everyday Spooks," Michal presents an unforgettable assortment of fantastic creatures that inhabit his strange vision of everyday reality in '50s and '60s communist Czechoslovakia. Translated from the Czech by David Short and complemented with suitably eerie illustrations by Dagmar Hamsikova, this collection of seven short stories describes bizarre encounters where the past melts into the present, ordinary people meet comic and anxious figures and interact with ghosts, and mundane speech drifts repeatedly into absurdity.