Sign up to our emails and be the first to know about new releases, special offers and more.
Become a Readings Member to make your shopping experience even easier. Sign in or sign up for free!
Hello Readings Member! Go to the member centre to view your orders, change your details, or view your lists, or sign out.
Australian Book Retailer of the Year 2021
Bohumil Hrabal
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 stock at 2 shops, ships in 3-4 daysIn stock at 2 shops
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.
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.
Available to order, ships in approx 4 weeksAvailable to order
A novel and texts by Bohumil Hrabal about the graphic artist Vladimir Boudnik, including Boudnik’s Explosionalist texts and artwork.
Available to order, ships in approx 2 weeksAvailable to order
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…
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…
Glimmers in anticipation of Hrabal’s later virtuosity.
-New Yorker
A collection of formative fiction from a writer whose work has earned comparison with Joyce and Beckett… . Early work from…
Available to order, ships in 10-14 daysAvailable to order
A short novel by Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, this eccentric romp celebrates the indestructability–against censorship and political oppression–of the written word.
Jiri Pelan
Described by Parul Sehgal in the New York Times Book Review as one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century; the scourge of state censors; the gregarious bar…
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ADAM THIRLWELL ‘Our very best writer today’ Milan Kundera Sparkling with comic genius and narrative exuberance, I Served the King of England is a story of…
Showcases the author’s bohemian intellectual life, and his relationship with Vladimir Boudnik.
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…
Inspired by Mrs Tolstoy and Mrs Dostoevsky, whose biographies about their husbands have been published in Prague, the author presents his own autobiographical work, ostensibly fiction, from his wife’s point…
Gaps begins with Hrabal receiving the long anticipated advance copy of his first short story collection, Perlicka na dne (Pearl of the Deep). Hrabal’s career as a successful writer starts…
A poignant, very funny novel full of unforgettable characters who reminisce about their changing country.
From the flamboyant and unpredictable Maryska, who scandalises the town when she cuts short her golden tresses, to the eccentric Uncle Pepin, who always has to have a ready supply…
Set in a small town in Czechoslovakia at the end of the War, this is the story of the wayward wife of a brewery manager. Maryska is wild and exuberant…
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…
An unforgettable portrait of a major pioneering artist, by Czechoslovakia’s greatest writer (Milan Kundera)
At a village railway station in occupied Czechoslovakia, a bumbling dispatcher’s apprentice longs to liberate himself from his virginity. Oblivious to the war and the resistance that surrounds him, this…
Available to order, ships in 3-5 daysAvailable to order
Wonderful stories of Communist Prague by the masterly Bohumil Hrabal (The New Yorker)
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. This book offers…
Martin Eckert
Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2007 im Fachbereich Russistik / Slavistik, Note: 1,4, Universitat Hamburg (Institut fur Slavistik), Veranstaltung: Bohumil Hrabal, 10 Quellen im Literaturverzeichnis, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Wer oder was…
A collection of 14 stories which are hard-edged yet possess warmth and humour. Their subjects are drinking, motorcycling and palavering .
Hrabal s books are distinctive witness to the life of ordinary people only at first glance. In the book, Rambling on await the reader stories set in the popular Hrabal…
Alexander Gotz
Der Tod Bohumil Hrabals 1997 hat das Werk dieses neben Milan Kundera bekanntesten und bedeutendsten tschechischen Nachkriegsautors erneut in das Blickfeld von Literaturwissenschaft und Lesepublikum geruckt. Anhand der nun vorliegenden…