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Bohumil Hrabal was born in 1914 in Brno-Zidenice, Moravia. He received a degree in Law from Prague's Charles University, and lived in Prague since the late 1940s. In the 1950s he worked as a manual laborer in the Kladno ironworks, from which he drew inspiration for his ""hyper-realist"" texts he was writing at that time. He won international acclaim for such books as I Served the King of England and Too Loud a Solitude. Hrabal is considered, along with Jaroslav Hasek and Karel Capek, as one of the greatest Czech writers of the 20th century, and perhaps the most important in the post-war period. In February 1997 he flew out of his hospital window never to return.
Written 50 years ago, in a country whose system of government is utterly alien to our lived experience, these stories are still laugh-aloud funny on pretty much every page * Spectator * One of the most authentic incarnations of magical Prague, an incredible union of earthy humor and baroque imagination -- Milan Kundera The discovery of Hrabal's style is very simple. It makes pleasure a principle... Each of Hrabal's novels describes a spiral, a constant intricate movement between pleasure and fear and guilt and delight: they describe the difficult effort to be a hedonist in a world where pleasure has disappeare -- Adam Thirlwell * Guardian * Hrabal bounces and floats. His mode is a sort of dancing realism, somewhere between fairytale and satire. He is a most sophisticated novelist, with a gusting humour and a hushed tenderness of detail. We should read him -- Julian Barnes Hrabal's magical stories are comic and human... They inhabit a utopian province, the realm of laughter and tears... A great writer -- James Wood * London Review of Books *
