Product Description: A collection of 14 stories which are hard-edged yet possess warmth and humour. Their subjects are drinking, motorcycling and "palavering".

Product Description: Rake, drunkard, aesthete, gossip, raconteur extraordinaire: the narrator of Bohumil Hrabal’s rambling, rambunctious masterpiece Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is all these and more. Speaking to a group of sunbathing women who remind him of lovers past, this elderly roué tells the story of his life—or at least unburdens himself of a lifetime’s worth of stories...read more

Product Description: In a comic masterpiece following the misadventures of a simple but hugely ambitious waiter in pre-World War II Prague, who rises to wealth only to lose everything with the onset of Communism, Bohumil Hrabal takes us on a tremendously funny and satirical trip through 20th-century Czechoslovakia...read more

Product Description: As Czechoslovakia's communist regime expired in 1989, Hrabal began to write after a long literary silence. He called his short individual texts lyrical reportage in the form of letters addressed to Dubenka (April Gifford), a visiting American student who became the muse of his later years...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

A grandiose old shoemaker tells his story to a circle of young women basking in the sun, a tale of amorous conquests and drunken misadventures

An English-language translation of a novel written in the 1970s by the Czech author of 'Closely Observed Trains' and 'Too Loud a Solitude'. By turns sad and funny, it is set in a small provincial town in Bohemia between the wars, and reflects the passing of an age upon a community.

In rural Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, eccentric Maryska scandalizes her brewery town, but after the war, although the town remains undamaged, subtle changes start to appear as Communism threatens the political order.

This parable of censorship and the modern state centers on Hanta, a trash collector whose habit of salvaging and reading discarded books has brought him both the richness of the classics and the ridicule of his boss