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Fueled by vast quantities of beer, emboldened by friendship, driven by a sense of their own destiny, they filled the intellectual and spiritual vacuum around them with manic humor, inspiration, and purpose, and in doing so, pointed the way to a kind of salvation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51201334018321,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51201336049937,"sku":"NGR9780811228589","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52849097965841,"sku":"NIN9780811228589","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0811228584.jpg?v=1751076545"},{"product_id":"in-house-weddings-book-bohumil-hrabal-9780810124301","title":"In-House Weddings","description":"Inspired by “Mrs. Tolstoy and Mrs. Dostoevsky, whose biographies about their husbands have now been published in Prague,” Bohumil Hrabal decided to produce his own autobiographical work, ostensibly fiction, from his wife’s point of view.  He would write, he said, “not a putdown about myself, but a little bit of how it all was, that marriage of ours, with myself as a jewel and adornment of our life together.”             The task, taken up by such a rogue comic talent, could be nothing other than strangely delightful; and in In-House Weddings, the first of the trilogy that Hrabal produced, we meet the author through the eyes of his wife Eliska.  She narrates his life from his upbringing in Nymburk through his work as a dispatcher in a train station and then in a scrap paper plant, his first publication, his trouble with the authorities, and his association with notable artists and authors such as Jiri Kolar, Vladimir Boudnik, and Arnost Lustig.  Hrabal’s bohemian life was itself a source of great interest to the Czech public; transmuted here, it is even more compelling, a wry portrait of artistic life in postwar Eastern Europe and a telling reflection on how such a life might be recast in the light of literary brilliance.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51326569578769,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51326574395665,"sku":"CIN0810124300VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51694705672465,"sku":"CIN0810124300G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0810124300.jpg?v=1763475762"},{"product_id":"closely-watched-trains-book-bohumil-hrabal-9780241752142","title":"Closely Watched Trains","description":"90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books  Closely Watched Trains tells the story of Miloš Hrma, a young railroad apprentice coming of age in wartime Czechoslovakia. 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From that point, he quickly made his mark on the Czech literary scene; by his death he was ranked with Jaroslav Ha ek, Karel Capek, and Milan Kundera as among the nation s greatest twentieth-century writers. Known for writing about political questions with humor and vivid expressiveness, Hrabal also was given to experimentation his early novel Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, for example, consists of a single extended sentence.\u003cbr\u003ePirouettes on a Postage Stamp carried Hrabal s experimentation to the field of autobiography. On its surface a verbatim record of an oral interview conducted by Hungarian journalist Laszlo Szigeti, the book confuses and confounds with false starts, digressions, and philosophical asides. 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