Description: "In the 1930s Europe is tangoing to the tune of a new age, but in rural Czechoslovakia golden-haired Maryska dances to a rhythm all her own. Not even her husband, Francin the brewery manager, can control her as Maryska shocks the populace with her scandalous behavior, and incurs the disapproval of a sheltered little town that is blissfully unaware of the cataclysmic world events that are about to engulf it. As World War II draws to a close, Maryska and her neighbors appear to have survived unscathed, but the new Communist political order creates tensions that tear through the social fabric in previously unimaginable ways. The Little Town Where Time Stood Still is Bohumil Hrabal's poignant, hilarious evocation of the passing of an era and the sweetness of love, lust, and life"--
Review Quotes:
"Read the stories. Read the novels. Just read Hrabal." --John Yargo, The Millions
"Hrabal is a most sophisticated novelist, with a gusting humour and a hushed tenderness of detail." --Julian Barnes "Hrabal's comedy is completely paradoxical. Holding in balance limitless desire and limited satisfaction, it is both rebellious and fatalistic, restless and wise." --James Wood "Czechoslovakia's greatest living writer." --Milan Kundera "Hrabal, to my mind, is one of the greatest living European prose writers." --Philip Roth "Hrabal combines good humour and hilarity with tenderness and a tragic sense of his country's history." --The Observer "There are pages of queer magic unlike anything currently being done with words." --The Guardian "A magnificent author." --The Independent Praise for Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (NYRB Classics) "Dancing Lessons unfurls as a single, sometimes maddening sentence. The gambit works. Something about that slab of wordage carries the eye forward, promising an intensity simply unattainable by your regularly punctuated novel." --Ed Park, The New York Times Book Review "What Hrabal has created is an informal history of the indomitable Czech spirit. And perhaps...the human spirit." --The Times (London)