Mr Kafka

Newly discovered stories by the greatest Czech writer of the twentieth century

Hrabal’s magical stories are comic and human... They inhabit a utopian province, the realm of laughter and tears... A great writer

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

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

One of the most authentic incarnations of magical Prague, an incredible union of earthy humor and baroque imagination

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

Laugh-aloud funny on pretty much every page.

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.

Enter the gas-lit streets of post-war Prague, the steelworks run by singed men, the covered market that smells of new-born babes, the cacophonous open-air dance hall. Mr Kafka is avoiding his landlady’s blueberry wine breath, a stonemason witnesses the destruction of a monument to Stalin he risked his life to build, and factory men strain to catch a glimpse of a beautiful bathing murderess. In these newly discovered stories, Hrabal captures men and women in an eerily beautiful nightmare and their spirit in all its misery and splendour.

Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age

The beauty of Hrabal's book is how he is able to make this tightly-wound object move...what Hrabal has created is an informal history of the indomitable Czech spirit. And perhaps...the human spirit

First-hand experience informs Hrabal's work with a wonderful detail, irascibility and charm

Hrabal has invented some of the most memorable characters in world literature

This ebullient, gallivanting novel encapsulates the world vision of the Czech Republic's best-loved author in one tumbling, breathtaking sentence. Saints and sinners, emperors and embezzlers, barmaids and balalaikas all play their part in the bawdy reminiscences of Hrabal's cobbler as he charms an audience of young beauties.

Bohumil Hrabal

Adam Thirlwell

Paul Wilson

The fantasising and storytelling deliver a body blow of total irreverence to the solemn mythopoeia of monumental historiography

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

A master of rueful comedy and tender eroticism, Hrabal was, for all his eccentricity, a major figure in 20th-century world literature.

Featuring an introduction by Adam Thirlwell

'Our very best writer today' Milan Kundera 
 
Ditie is a pint-sized hotel waiter with big dreams. 
 
Between pocketing stolen change from unsuspecting customers and reminiscing on nights spent at the local brothel, he fantasises about his immense - and imagined - riches. 
 
Then, ludicrously, Ditie’s dreams start to become reality. 
 
Yet while his chaotic adventures lead him to ever more glamorous hotels, beyond the sparkling dining halls, the forces of twentieth-century European history march on. 
 
A whirlwind of comic genius, a gut-punch of narrative power, this is the story of one small man’s rise and fall – or fall and rise – against the shadowy backdrop of Europe’s darkest days. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ADAM THIRLWELL 
 
‘An extraordinary and subtly tragicomic novel’ 
New York Times 
 
‘Hrabal bounces and floats... with a gusting humour and a hushed tenderness of detail’ 
Julian Barnes 
 
‘A joyful, picaresque story, which begins with Baron Munchausen-like adventures and ends in tears and solitude.’ 
James Wood

I Served The King Of England

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Best-Jane-Austen-quotes_Online-Desktop_Penguin

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Bohumil Hrabal

Praise for I Served The King Of England

The fantasising and storytelling deliver a body blow of total irreverence to the solemn mythopoeia of monumental historiography

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 h ...

Well worth reading

The fantasising and storytelling deliver a body blow of total irreverence to the solemn mythopoeia of monumental historiography

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 h ...

Well worth reading

The fantasising and storytelling deliver a body blow of total irreverence to the solemn mythopoeia of monumental historiography

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 h ...

Well worth reading

Books by Bohumil Hrabal

Series by Bohumil Hrabal

Brief Encounters

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter