About the Author

Bohumil Hrabal (1914-97) is considered, along with Karel Capek and Milan Kundera, to be one of the great Czech writers of the twentieth century. He won international acclaim for the novels Closely Watched Trains (Northwestern, 1995), Too Loud a Solitude (1992), and I Served the King of England (1989). Tony Liman was born in Czechoslovakia in 1966 and grew up in Toronto. He received his M.F.A. from the University of British Columbia. He is a writer and translator, and his fiction has appeared in several Canadian literary journals. Liman lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Reviews

"Hrabal, both as character in and author of Vita Nuova, seeks epiphanies in disorder, and intimations of the infinite in weakness and the grotesque. His metaphysics of the ordinary finds in the corrupted, chance-afflicted world flashes of beauty and transcendence: pearls in the mud. [Vita Nuova] is a refusal of artistic "normalization"...a lively emulation of the ars prosaica of a great Czech writer of the twentieth century." --The Times Literary Supplement