An elaborate, elegant homage to the great Czech storyteller Bohumil Hrabal (author of Closely Watched Trains), The Book of Hrabal is also a farewell to the years of communism in Eastern Europe and a g
First published in 1971 in a typewritten edition, then finally printed in book form in 1989, I Served the King of England is "an extraordinary and subtly tragicomic novel" (The New York Times), tellin
Described by Parul Sehgal in the New York Times Book Review as “one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century; the scourge of state censors; the gregarious bar hound and lover of goss
Hrabal’s books are distinctive witness to the life of ordinary people only at first glance. In the book, Rambling on await the reader stories set in the popular Hrabal’s Kersko. The book was filmed in
Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia―no longer on the map. East Europe of the socialist period may seem like a historical oddity, apparently so different from everything before and after. Yet the masterpieces of literature and cinema from this largely forgotten “Second World,” as well as by the authors formed in it and working in its aftermath, surprise and delight with their contemporary resonance. This book introduces and illuminates a number of these works. It explores how their aesthetic ingenuity discovers ways of engaging existential and universal predicaments, such as how one may survive in the world of victimizations, or imagine a good city, or broach the human boundaries to live as a plant. Like true classics of world art, these novels, stories, and films―to rephrase Bohumil Hrabal―keep “telling us things about ourselves we don’t know.” In lively and jargon-free prose, Gordana P. Crnkovic builds on her rich teaching experience to create paths to these works and reveal how they changed
