I Served The King Of England: Featuring an introduction by Adam Thirlwell (Vintage Classics)

Bohumil Hrabal (Author)
Bohumil Hrabal was born in 1914 in Brno-Zidenice, Moravia. He received a degree in Law from Prague's Charles University, and lived in Prague since the late 1940s. In the 1950s he worked as a manual laborer in the Kladno ironworks, from which he drew inspiration for his hyper-realist texts he was writing at that time. He won international acclaim for such books as I Served the King of England and Too Loud a Solitude. Hrabal is considered, along with Jaroslav Hasek and Karel Capek, as one of the greatest Czech writers of the 20th century, and perhaps the most important in the post-war period. In February 1997 he flew out of his hospital window never to return.

Adam Thirlwell (Introducer)
Adam Thirlwell is the author of two novels, Politics and The Escape; a novella, Kapow!; and a project including an essay-book - which won a Somerset Maugham Award - and a compendium of translations edited for McSweeney's. His work is translated into thirty languages. He has twice been selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.

Title: I Served The King Of England: Featuring an introduction by Adam Thirlwell (Vintage Classics)

Author: Bohumil Hrabal

ISBN: 9780099540939

Binding:

Publisher: Vintage Publishing

Publication Date: 2009-08-06

Number of Pages: 288

Weight: 0.1996 kg

The fantasising and storytelling deliver a body blow of total irreverence to the solemn mythopoeia of monumental historiography * Times Literary Supplement *
Hrabal bounces and floats. His mode is a sort of dancing realism, somewhere between fairytale and satire.He is a most sophisticated novelist, with a gusting humour and a hushed tenderness of detail. We should read him -- Julian Barnes
Well worth reading * The Book Magazine *
A master of rueful comedy and tender eroticism, Hrabal was, for all his eccentricity, a major figure in 20th-century world literature. -- Jonathan Coe