Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age: An exuberantly inventive novella from the great Czech author of I Served the King of England. (Brief Encounters) - Softcover

Hrabal, Bohumil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1529986109 ISBN 13: 9781529986105

Publisher: Vintage Classics, 2026

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the 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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Vintage Classics
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1529986109
• ISBN 13: 9781529986105
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96