Items related to Mr. Kafka: And Other Tales from the Time of the Cult
Synopsis
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.”"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) was born in Moravia. He is the author of such classics as Closely Watched Trains (made into an Academy-Award winning film by Jiri Menzel), The Death of Mr. Baltisberger, I Served the King of England, and Too Loud a Solitude. He fell to his death from the fifth floor of a Prague hospital, apparently trying to feed the pigeons.
Paul Wilson has translated books by Václav Havel, Bohumil Hrabal, Ivan Klima and Josef Škvorecký. He lives in Canada.
Review
“One of the most authentic incarnations of magical Prague, an incredible union of earthy humor and baroque imagination.”
- Milan Kundera
“Hrabal’s magical stories are comic and human―they are really desires embodied. . . . They inhabit a utopian province, the realm of laughter and tears.”
- James Wood, London Review of Books
“The essence of Hrabal’s fiction is to draw beauty from what isn’t, to find hope where we’re not likely to look . . . to show that we are all of us ‘magnificent.'”
- Meghan Forbes, The Los Angeles Review of Books
“An often powerful and occasionally unnerving collection of stories from a half-century ago [...] the timelessness of the best of these stories attests to a human spirit undimmed by the darkest of circumstances.”
- Kirkus Reviews
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherNew Directions
- Publication date2015
- ISBN 10 0811224805
- ISBN 13 9780811224802
- BindingPaperback
- LanguageEnglish
- Number of pages160
- Rating
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Soft cover. Condition: New. No Jacket. Translated into English by Paul Wilson. Collection of stories written in the 1950s, first published in Czechoslovakia in 1965. This is the first publication in English of these stories, when "capture a time when Czech Stalinists were turning society upside down, inflicting their social and political experiments on mostly unwilling subjects" Stories set on the streets of Prague, in factories, in an open air dance hall, and show people's lives caught in a nightmare not of their doing.Published @ $14.95. Seller Inventory # 017379
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