"Czechoslovakia's greatest living writer." — Milan Kundera. In this moving, absorbing novel, we meet the eccentric residents of a home for the elderly who reminisce about their lives and their changing country. Written with a keen eye for the absurd and peppered with dialogue that captures the poignancy of the everyday, Harlequin's Millions is a sensual delight. Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997) worked as a railway dispatcher during the Nazi occupation of then-Czechoslovakia, a traveling salesman, a steelworker, a recycling mill worker, and a stagehand. His novels were censored under the Communist regime and have since been translated into nearly thirty languages

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.”

Jeden z nejznámějších Hrabalových románů, byl také zfilmován. Hlavní postavou je manželka správce pivovaru — Maryša. Příběh se skládá z jednotlivých událostí, tak jak se v pivovaru stávají. Maryša je velmi sebejistá a energická žena, kterou mají v okolí rádi a všichni na ni obdivují její krásné dlouhé vlasy. Jednou pořádá Maryša zabijačku a pozve na ni celou správní radu pivovaru, které je odpovědný její manžel — Francin. Ten zabijačky nesnáší a má nejraději bílou kávu a chleba. Jeho žena je však pravým opakem, ráda pije pivo a jí maso. Její libůstkou je projíždět se na kole a ukazovat všem své dlouhé vlasy. O ty jí pečuje kadeřník Bóďa, který jí vlasy koupe a pak jí je přidržuje, když se rozjíždí na kole. Jednoho dne navštíví pivovar Francinův bratr Pepin, povoláním švec, který je trochu blázen…

Novelist Bohumil Hrabal (1914-97) was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and spent decades working at a variety of laboring jobs before turning to writing in his late forties. From that point, he quickly made his mark on the Czech literary scene; by the time of his death he was ranked with Jaroslav Hašek, Karel Capek, and Milan Kundera as among the nation's greatest twentieth-century writers. Hrabal’s fiction blends tragedy with humor and explores the anguish of intellectuals and ordinary people alike from a slightly surreal perspective. His work ranges from novels and poems to film scripts and essays. Rambling On is a collection of stories set in Hrabal's Kersko. Several of the stories were written before the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague but had to be reworked when they were rejected by Communist censorship during the 1970s. This edition features the original, uncensored versions of those stories