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The Book Of Hrabal
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Book Synopsis The Book of Hrabal by : Péter Esterházy
Download or read book The Book of Hrabal written by Péter Esterházy and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An elaborate, elegant homage to the great Czech storyteller Bohumil Hrabal (author of Closely Watched Trains), The Book of Hrabal is also a farewell to the years of communism in Eastern Europe and a glowing paean to the mixed blessings of domestic life.
Download or read book All My Cats written by Bohumil Hrabal and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literary master’s story about the aggravations and great joys of cats, from “a most sophisticated novelist, with a gusting humor and a hushed tenderness of detail” (Julian Barnes) In the autumn of 1965, flush with the unexpected success of his first published books, the Czech author Bohumil Hrabal bought a cottage in Kersko. From then until his death in 1997, he divided his time between Prague and his country retreat, where he wrote and tended to a community of feral cats. Over the years, his relationship to cats grew deeper and more complex, becoming a measure of the pressures, both private and public, that impinged on his life as a writer. All My Cats, written in 1983 after a serious car accident, is a confessional memoir, the chronicle of an author who becomes overwhelmed. As he is driven to the brink of madness by the dilemmas created by his indulgent love for the animals, there are episodes of intense brutality as he controls the feline population. Yet in the end, All My Cats is a book about Hrabal’s relationship to nature, about the unlikely sources of redemption that come to him unbidden, like a gift from the cosmos—and about love.
Book Synopsis Too Loud a Solitude by : Bohumil Hrabal
Download or read book Too Loud a Solitude written by Bohumil Hrabal and published by HMH. This book was released on 1992-04-27 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fable about the power of books and knowledge, “finely balanced between pathos and comedy,” from one of Czechoslovakia’s most popular authors (Los Angeles Times). A New York Times Notable Book Haňtá has been compacting trash for thirty-five years. Every evening, he rescues books from the jaws of his hydraulic press, carries them home, and fills his house with them. Haňtá may be an idiot, as his boss calls him, but he is an idiot with a difference—the ability to quote the Talmud, Hegel, and Lao-Tzu. In this “irresistibly eccentric romp,” the author Milan Kundera has called “our very best writer today” celebrates the power and the indestructibility of the written word (The New York Times Book Review).
Book Synopsis Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by : Bohumil Hrabal
Download or read book Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age written by Bohumil Hrabal and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-04-25 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. Thus we learn of amatory conquests (and humiliations), of scandals both private and public, of military adventures and domestic feuds, of what things were like “in the days of the monarchy” and how they’ve changed since. As the book tumbles restlessly forward, and the comic tone takes on darker shadings, we realize we are listening to a man talking as much out of desperation as from exuberance. Hrabal, one of the great Czech writers of the twentieth century, as well as an inveterate haunter of Prague’s pubs and football stadiums, developed a unique method which he termed “palavering,” whereby characters gab and soliloquize with abandon. Part drunken boast, part soul-rending confession, part metaphysical poem on the nature of love and time, this astonishing novel (which unfolds in a single monumental sentence) shows why he has earned the admiration of such writers as Milan Kundera, John Banville, and Louise Erdrich.
Book Synopsis I Served the King of England by : Bohumil Hrabal
Download or read book I Served the King of England written by Bohumil Hrabal and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles the experiences of Ditie, who rises from busboy to hotel owner in World War II Prague, and whose life is shaped by the fate of his country before, during, and after the conflict.
Book Synopsis Closely Watched Trains by : Bohumil Hrabal
Download or read book Closely Watched Trains written by Bohumil Hrabal and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Milos 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.
Book Synopsis Mr. Kafka: And Other Tales from the Time of the Cult by : Bohumil Hrabal
Download or read book Mr. Kafka: And Other Tales from the Time of the Cult written by Bohumil Hrabal and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-27 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wonderful stories of Communist Prague by “the masterly Bohumil Hrabal” (The New Yorker) 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.”
Download or read book Am I Alone Here? written by Peter Orner and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2016-10-25 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This National Book Critics Circle Award is “an entrancing attempt to catch what falls between: the irreducibly personal, messy, even embarrassing ways reading and living bleed into each other, which neither literary criticism nor autobiography ever quite acknowledges.” —The New York Times “Stories, both my own and those I’ve taken to heart, make up whoever it is that I’ve become,” Peter Orner writes in this collection of essays about reading, writing, and living. Orner reads and writes everywhere he finds himself: a hospital cafeteria, a coffee shop in Albania, or a crowded bus in Haiti. The result is a book of unlearned meditations that stumbles into memoir. Among the many writers Orner addresses are Isaac Babel and Zora Neale Hurston, both of whom told their truths and were silenced; Franz Kafka, who professed loneliness but craved connection; Robert Walser, who spent the last twenty-three years of his life in a Swiss insane asylum, working at being crazy; and Juan Rulfo, who practiced the difficult art of silence. Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, Yasunari Kawabata, Saul Bellow, Mavis Gallant, John Edgar Wideman, William Trevor, and Václav Havel make appearances, as well as the poet Herbert Morris--about whom almost nothing is known. An elegy for an eccentric late father, and the end of a marriage, Am I Alone Here? is also a celebration of the possibility of renewal. At once personal and panoramic, this book will inspire readers to return to the essential stories of their own lives.
Book Synopsis The Death of Mr. Baltisberger by : Bohumil Hrabal
Download or read book The Death of Mr. Baltisberger written by Bohumil Hrabal and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-30 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published as The Death of Mr. Baltisberger, the fourteen stories in Romance showcase the breadth of Bohumil Hrabal’s considerable gifts: his humor of the grotesque, his often surprising warmth, and his hard-edged, fast-paced style. In the story "Romance," a plumber’s apprentice and a gypsy girl reach toward a tentative connection across the chasm that separates their worlds. Another unlikely love story, "World Cafeteria," features a romance between a young man whose girlfriend has just committed suicide and a bride whose husband lands in jail on their wedding night. The tone turns to the absurd in "The Death of Mr. Baltisberger," where a crippled ex-motorcyclist and three people he meets at the track exchange wildly improbably reminiscences, while a fatal Grand Prix motorcycle race rages around them. Hrabal’s psychological insight into quotidian interactions saturates stories such as "A Dull Afternoon," where a mysterious, self-absorbed stranger disrupts the psychic calm of a neighborhood tavern and becomes the silent catalyst for an unwanted truth. Throughout the collection, noted translator Michael Henry Heim captures the quirky speech patterns and idiosyncratic takes on life that have made Hrabal’s characters an indispensable part of world literature.
Download or read book Total Fears written by Bohumil Hrabal and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these letters written to April Gifford (Dubenka) between 1989 and 1991 but never sent, Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) chronicles the momentous events of those years as seen, more often than not, from the windows of his favorite pubs. In his palavering, stream-of-conscious style that has marked him as one of the major writers and innovators of postwar European literature, Hrabal gives a humorous and at times moving account of life in Prague under Nazi occupation, Communism, and the brief euphoria following the revolution of 1989 when anything seemed possible, even pink tanks. Interspersed are fragmented memories of trips taken to Britain ¿ as he attempted to track down every location mentioned in Eliot¿s ¿The Waste Land¿ ¿ and the United States, where he ends up in one of Dylan Thomas¿s haunts comparing the waitresses to ones he knew in Prague. The result is a masterful blend of personal history and fee association rendered in a prose as powerful as it is poetic.
Author :Bohumil Hrabal Publisher :Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press ISBN 13 :8024642689 Total Pages :520 pages Book Rating :4.0/5 (246 download)
Download or read book Why I Write? written by Bohumil Hrabal and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of the earliest prose by one of literature’s greatest stylists captures, as scholar Arnault Maréchal put it, “the moment when Hrabal discovered the magic of writing.” Taken from the period when Bohumil Hrabal shifted his focus from poetry to prose, these stories—many written in school notebooks, typed and read aloud to friends, or published in samizdat—often showcase raw experiments in style that would define his later works. Others intriguingly utilize forms the author would never pursue again. Featuring the first appearance of key figures from Hrabal’s later writings, such as his real-life Uncle Pepin, who would become a character in his later fiction and is credited here as a coauthor of one piece, the book also contains stories that Hrabal would go on to cannibalize for some of his most famous novels. All together, Why I Write? offers readers the chance to explore this liminal phase of Hrabal’s writing. Expertly interpreted by award-winning Hrabal translator David Short, this collection comprises some of the last remaining prose works by Hrabal to be translated into English. A treasure trove for Hrabal devotees, Why I Write? allows us to see clearly why this great prose master was, as described by Czech writer and publisher Josef Škvorecký, “fundamentally a lyrical poet.”
Book Synopsis The Little Town Where Time Stood Still by : Bohumil Hrabal
Download or read book The Little Town Where Time Stood Still written by Bohumil Hrabal and published by Penguin Classics. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Folks, life is beautiful! Bring on the drinks, I'm sticking around till I'm ninety! Do you hear?' A young boy grows up in a sleepy Czech community where little changes. His raucous, mischievous Uncle Pepin came to stay with the family years ago, and never left. But the outside world is encroaching on their close-knit town - first in the shape of German occupiers, and then with the new Communist order. Elegiac and moving, Bohumil Hrabal's gem-like portrayal of the passing of an age is filled with wit, life and tenderness. 'What is unique about Hrabal is his capacity for joy' Milan Kundera 'Even in a town where nothing happens, Hrabal's meticulous and exuberant fascination with the human voice insists that, as long as there's still breath in a body, life is endlessly eventful' Independent
Book Synopsis The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by : Alan Jacobs
Download or read book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction written by Alan Jacobs and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-26 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, cultural commentators have sounded the alarm about the dire state of reading in America. Americans are not reading enough, they say, or reading the right books, in the right way. In this book, Alan Jacobs argues that, contrary to the doomsayers, reading is alive and well in America. There are millions of devoted readers supporting hundreds of enormous bookstores and online booksellers. Oprah's Book Club is hugely influential, and a recent NEA survey reveals an actual uptick in the reading of literary fiction. Jacobs's interactions with his students and the readers of his own books, however, suggest that many readers lack confidence; they wonder whether they are reading well, with proper focus and attentiveness, with due discretion and discernment. Many have absorbed the puritanical message that reading is, first and foremost, good for you--the intellectual equivalent of eating your Brussels sprouts. For such people, indeed for all readers, Jacobs offers some simple, powerful, and much needed advice: read at whim, read what gives you delight, and do so without shame, whether it be Stephen King or the King James Version of the Bible. In contrast to the more methodical approach of Mortimer Adler's classic How to Read a Book (1940), Jacobs offers an insightful, accessible, and playfully irreverent guide for aspiring readers. Each chapter focuses on one aspect of approaching literary fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, and the book explores everything from the invention of silent reading, reading responsively, rereading, and reading on electronic devices. Invitingly written, with equal measures of wit and erudition, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction will appeal to all readers, whether they be novices looking for direction or old hands seeking to recapture the pleasures of reading they first experienced as children.
Download or read book Rambling On written by Bohumil Hrabal and published by Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2014-03-01 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bohumil Hrabal (1914–97) has been ranked with Jaroslav Hašek, Karel Čapek, and Milan Kundera as among the greatest twentieth-century Czech writers. Hrabal's fiction blends tragedy with humor and explores the anguish of intellectuals and ordinary people alike from a slightly surreal perspective. Rambling On is a collection of stories set in Hrabal's Kersko that depicts the hilariously absurd atmosphere of a tiny cottage community in the heart of a forest in the middle of totalitarian Czechoslovakia. Several of these stories were rejected by the Communist censors during the 1970s; this first English translation features the original, uncensored versions.
Book Synopsis In-House Weddings by : Bohumil Hrabal
Download or read book In-House Weddings written by Bohumil Hrabal and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2007-08-13 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The task, taken up by such a rogue comic talent, could be nothing other than strangely delightful; and in In-House Weddings, the first of the trilogy that Hrabal produced, we meet the author through the eyes of his wife Eliska. She narrates his life from his upbringing in Nymburk through his work as a dispatcher in a train station and then in a scrap paper plant, his first publication, his trouble with the authorities, and his association with notable artists and authors such as Jiri Kolar, Vladimir Boudnik, and Arnost Lustig.
Book Synopsis The Tender Barbarian by : Bohumil Hrabal
Download or read book The Tender Barbarian written by Bohumil Hrabal and published by Image to Word. This book was released on 2019-10-23 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Tender Barbarian is a series of texts Hrabal compiled on the one hand pays homage to his deceased friend, experimental graphic artist Vladimír Boudník, and on the other as a somewhat fictionalized account of their life during the 1950s in Prague-Libe?, avant-garde poet/philosopher Egon Bondy acting as Boudník's foil and dialectical antithesis. By the end of the 1940s all three were trying to move beyond Surrealism: Bondy and Hrabal with Total Realism and Boudník with Explosionalism, an associative method of graphically interpreting random blotches. Boudník here plays the naif, a proletarian artist, a tender barbarian to whom a state of grace comes naturally, spontaneously, while for Bondy, who is poring over philosophical tomes to learn how to achieve such a state, this becomes a never-ending source of frustration and admiration, to which he reacts with streams of invective. Hrabal once mentioned that when he sat down in 1973 to write something about Boudník for an exhibition and samizdat publication to commemorate the fifth anniversary of his death, he just kept writing and writing, and the book does read almost like an automatic text as one episode spills into another, the interplay between the two protagonists forming the dialectic that Hrabal indicates he has borrowed from Boudník's mode of being and creating.Whether the book is rightly called a novel, fiction or non-fiction, or both at once, it is a compelling testament to an era and a group of friends who lived for and in art and managed to find beauty and the marvelous even in the dungheap that was Stalinist Czechoslovakia. As Hrabal put it: "I saw two people with the thumbprint of God on their brows: Vladimír and Egon Bondy." This edition is complemented by a selection of Boudník's Explosionalist texts and prints.
Author :Tomáš Glanc Publisher :Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press ISBN 13 :8024640333 Total Pages :245 pages Book Rating :4.0/5 (246 download)
Book Synopsis Samizdat Past and Present by : Tomáš Glanc
Download or read book Samizdat Past and Present written by Tomáš Glanc and published by Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2019-02-01 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology of texts by Czech literary scientists presents the phenomenon of the samizdat and its historical transformation. The chapters primarily focus on the definition of the samizdat itself as well as the extensive controversy over the concept of unofficial literature. The scholars also pay attention to the origin, development and characteristics of the various samizdat editions; individual chapters are devoted to underground production and censorship. One chapter deals with the relationship between domestic samizdat production and exile literature. In the final chapters of the publication, samizdat is covered also in the international context, in particular in the Polish and Russian contexts. This book, Samizdat Past and Present, is a representative publication presenting the diverse forms of samizdat and has the potential to become a basic guide on the issue.
