Hanta rescues books from the jaws of his compacting press and carries them home. Hrabal, whom Milan Kundera calls our very best writer today, celebrates the power and the indestructibility of the written word. Translated by Michael Henry Heim.
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Sparkling with comic genius and narrative exuberance, this is the story of how the unbelievable came true. Its hero, Ditie, is a hotel waiter who rises to become a millionaire and then loses it all again against the backdrop of events in Prague from German invasion to the victory of Communism.

This Rabelaisian tale is composed of a single rambling sentence by the narrator, a shoemaker nearing 70 years of age. One drunken thought triggers another, as he delivers a lengthy monologue to six sunbathing women."

Never before published in English, the stories in Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult were written mostly in the 1950s and present the Czech master Bohumil Hrabal at the height of his powers. The stories capture a time when Czech Stalinists were turning society upside down, inflicting their social and political experiments on mostly unwilling subjects. These stories are set variously in the gas-lit streets of post-war Prague; on the raucous and dangerous factory floor of the famous Poldi steelworks where Hrabal himself once worked; in a cacophonous open-air dance hall where...

Mr Kafka is avoiding his landlady's blueberry wine breath, a stonemason witnesses the destruction of a monument to Stalin, and factory men strain to catch a glimpse of a beautiful bathing murderess. This title tells stories that capture men and women in an eerily beautiful nightmare and their spirit in all its misery and splendour.

Novelist Bohumil Hrabal was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and he spent decades working at a variety of laboring jobs before turning to writing in his late forties. From that point, he quickly made his mark on the Czech literary scene; by the time of his death he was ranked with Jaroslav Hasek, Karel Capek, and Milan Kundera as among the nation's greatest twentieth-century writers. Hrabal's fiction blends tragedy with humor and explores the anguish of intellectuals and ordinary people alike from a slightly surreal perspective. His work ranges from novels and poems to film scripts and essays....

'One of the greatest European prose writers' Philip Roth In the autumn of 1965, Bohumil Hrabal bought a weekend cottage in the countryside east of Prague. There, until his death, he tended to an ever-growing, unruly community of cats. This is his confessional, tender and shocking meditation on the joys and torments of his life with them; how he became increasingly overwhelmed by the demands of the things he loved, even to the brink of madness. 'Dark and strange ... It begins with warmth and fluffiness, but soon descends into Dostoevskian horror' Daily Telegraph 'The Czech master...