Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age

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A01=Bohumil Hrabal
Author_Bohumil Hrabal
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Product details

  • ISBN 9781529986105
  • Weight: 76g
  • Dimensions: 130 x 197mm
  • Publication Date: 02 Jul 2026
  • Publisher: Vintage Publishing
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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This ebullient, gallivanting novella encapsulates the world vision of the Czech Republic's best-loved author in one tumbling, breathtaking sentence.

An ageing man holds court, spinning a single, unbroken stream of stories about his life – loves won and lost, jobs taken and abandoned, moments of absurdity and chance. As he talks, the line between memory and invention begins to blur.

BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days.

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.

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