Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) was born in Moravia and started writing poems under the influence of French surrealism. In the early 1950s he began to experiment with a stream-of-consciousness style, and eventually wrote such classics as I Served the King of England, Closely Watched Trains (made into an Academy Award-winning film directed by Jiri Menzel), The Death of Mr. Baltisberger, and Too Loud a Solitude. He fell to his death from the fifth floor of a Prague hospital, apparently trying to feed the pigeons. Paul Wilson has translated books by Vaclav Havel, Bohumil Hrabal, Ivan Klima and Josef Skvorecky. He lives in Canada.
"One of the most authentic incarnations of magical Prague, an incredible union of earthy humor and baroque imagination." -- Milan Kundera "Hrabal's magical stories are comic and human-they are really desires embodied... They inhabit a utopian province, the realm of laughter and tears." -- James Wood - London Review of Books "The essence of Hrabal's fiction is to draw beauty from what isn't, to find hope where we're not likely to look ... to show that we are all of us 'magnificent.'" -- Meghan Forbes - The Los Angeles Review of Books "An often powerful and occasionally unnerving collection of stories from a half-century ago [...] the timelessness of the best of these stories attests to a human spirit undimmed by the darkest of circumstances." -- Kirkus Reviews
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