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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In these letters written to April Gifford (Dubenka) between 1989 and 1991 but never sent, Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) chronicles the momentous events of those years as seen, more often than not, from the windows of his favorite pubs. In his palavering, stream-of-conscious style that has marked him as one of the major writers and innovators of postwar European literature, Hrabal gives a humorous and at times moving account of life in Prague under Nazi occupation, Communism, and the brief euphoria following the revolution of 1989 when anything seemed possible, even pink tanks. Interspersed are...

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....