Bohumil Hrabal

The new Marshal Guarnaccia novel from acclaimed crime writer Magdalen Nabb'Credible, classy and compelling, this is crime fiction at its best' Sunday Times.When Marshal Guarnaccia is called upon to investigate the murder of a young woman, he is convinced that there's more to her family than meets the eye, and wonders if the girl's father, Paoletti, might have had something to do with her death.Enlisting the help of a local journalist, Marshal Guarnaccia's investigations draw him into the seedy underworld of Florence – lap dancing, prostitution and the illegal, human trafficking of Eastern European women who are sold into the sex trade. But can he save these women before it's too late? And what do they have to do with the killing of Daniela Paoletti? Distracted by the plight of these women and the murder investigation, Guarnaccia forgets about his own personal problems but it's not long before he has choices to make – should he seek help and risk exposing himself and possibly losing his job, or should he go it alone?

Hrabal's postwar classic about a young man's coming of age in German-occupied Czechoslovakia is among his most beloved and accessible works. Closely Watched Trains is the subtle and poetic portrait of Miloš Hrma, a timid young railroad apprentice who insulates himself with fantasy against a reality filled with cruelty and grief. Day after day as he watches trains fly by, he torments himself with the suspicion that he himself is being watched and with fears of impotency. Hrma finally affirms his manhood and, with a sense of peace and purpose he has never known before, heroically confronts a trainload of Nazis. Milan Kundera called the novel "an incredible union of earthly humor and baroque imagination." After receiving acclaim as a novel, Closely Watched Trains was made into an internationally successful film that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film of 1967. This edition includes a foreword by Josef Škvorecký.

A searing, humorous, satirical and soul searching novel, almost picaresque, about a young waiter in pre-war and wartime Czechoslovakia. As we follow him from the failures to the successes, the joys and despairs of his life and his country's, we cannot but empathise with him. His marriage to a German girl does not bring him any favours from his wife's Nazi colleagues, while it brings down fierce opprobrium on his head as a collaborator from the Czechs.

Funny, absurd, sad, ultimately tragic and at the same time affirmational, this story of Hanta is one of the great celebrations of the human spirit and of the transcendent value of art and beauty. (It is also a sly and delightful satire on totalitarian attempts to control what we read, think, and feel.) Hrabal is one of the most delightful and unpredictable writers of all time, and for all that this book takes place in a filthy cellar with the background noises of rats fighting in the sewers, it is an exhilarating and uplifting hymn to the beauty and worth of the human spirit.

"This translation is based on the first edition of Morytáty a legendy, published in 1968 by Československý spisovatel. The images that accompany each story are from woodcuts originally created for old broadside ballads and reproduced as illustrations for that first edition. Morytáty a legendy arrived in the early months of the Prague Spring . . . . Morytáty a legendy was a collection of unpublished short stories, some new and some old. The author's "post scripts" contain his comments at the time of publication and represent a self-effacing running commentary on his method, which mines pub tales and urban folklore for material. The post scripts offer everything from needed explanatory notes ("A Legend Played on Strings Stretched between Cradle and Coffin") to outright mystification ("The Ballad of the Queen of the Night") to an epilogue four times the length of the story itself ("The Legend of Egon Bondy and Vladimírek"). The "Vladimírek" epilogue provides a foretaste of The Tender Barbarian (Něžný barbar, completed 1973), Hrabal's autobiographical tribute to the artist Vladimír Boudník, who would die suddenly at the end of 1968. At the book's heart is "The Legend of Cain," a bleak story written nearly twenty years earlier and the basis for the novella Closely Watched Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky, 1965)" --

Vita nuova. Hrabal. Bohumil4070.

An elderly rake and womanizer tells his life's story to a group of sunbathing women who remind him of past lovers. Entire story is written in one long sentence.

"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 classical and popular music come to blows; at the basement studio where a crazed artist attempts to fashion a national icon; on the scaffolding around a decommissioned church. Hrabal captures men and women trapped in an eerily beautiful nightmare, longing for a world where "humor and metaphysical escape can reign supreme' " --

28. března 2014 uplyne 100. výročí narození Bohumila Hrabala, jednoho z nejvýznamnějších spisovatelů české poválečné literatury a kmenového autora nakladatelství Mladá fronta. K tomuto výročí jsme pro Vás připravili to nejlepší z díla Bohumila Hrabala v kompletu. Slavnosti sněženek, Ostře sledované vlaky, Něžný barbar, Postřižiny.

"Bohumil Hrabal was born 1914 in Brno, Moravia. At the beginning of 1989, after a long literary silence, Hrabal again began to write regularly - this time short individual texts. He considered these his "lyrical reportage" and gave them the form of letters addressed to Dubenka (April Gifford), the muse of his later years. In these letters, spanning the period from 1989 to 1992, Hrabal provides something akin to memoir in a humorous and often moving tumult of free association. He died in 1997 in Prague."--BOOK JACKET.

Tells the story of Milos Hrma, a young railway junior dispatcher and signalman returning to work at a minor but strategically important Czech railway station. Milos has been away for three months, recuperating from a suicide attempt, and is warmly welcomed back by Station Master Lansky and Dispatcher Hubicka. The year is 1945, the Germans have lost command of the air-space over the town, but it remains an important rail hub for them and certain key transport trains are nominated by the German high command for "close surveillance" to ensure that they are not delayed by signals failures or problems on the lines.

"By the writer whom Milan Kundera called Czechoslovakia's greatest contemporary writer comes a novel (now in English for the first time) peopled with eccentric, unforgettable inhabitants of a home for the elderly who reminisce about their lives and their changing country. Written with a keen eye for the absurd and sprinkled with dialogue that captures the poignancy of the everyday, this novel allows us into the mind of an elderly woman coming to terms with the passing of time. --

"In the 1930s Europe is tangoing to the tune of a new age, but in rural Czechoslovakia golden-haired Maryska dances to a rhythm all her own. Not even her husband, Francin the brewery manager, can control her as Maryska shocks the populace with her scandalous behavior, and incurs the disapproval of a sheltered little town that is blissfully unaware of the cataclysmic world events that are about to engulf it. As World War II draws to a close, Maryska and her neighbors appear to have survived unscathed, but the new Communist political order creates tensions that tear through the social fabric in previously unimaginable ways. The Little Town Where Time Stood Still is Bohumil Hrabal's poignant, hilarious evocation of the passing of an era and the sweetness of love, lust, and life"--