"Hrabal's images and language, his anecdotes and precise observations create an exceptionally sensuous reverie about the passage of time. . . Hrabal elicits from his adult reader not just sweet Proustian melancholy but also a better, deeper appreciation of the bright but evanescent sunshine outside." -- Washington Post

"Knecht has guided this quiet book into an engaging, heartfelt experience without letting it drop into mawkish emofiction." -- Shelf Awareness

"You get to laze around in beautiful, page-long sentences deep with observation and memory. The rhythm and lyricism are powerful and subtle. I can't believe I'm writing this. It sounds like a book I would detest. And yet it stays perched at the top of my longlist." -- BTBA Judge George Carroll

"The song ['Harlequin's Millions'] infuses the book, a sad soundtrack to a novel that manages to be vibrant and wistful. Thanks to Stacey Knecht's expert translation, one of the 20th century's most inventive literary talents feels very much alive." -- Malcolm Forbes, The Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Czechoslovakia's greatest living writer." --Milan Kundera

"Hrabal, to my mind, is one of the greatest living European prose writers." --Philip Roth, 1990

"There are pages of queer magic unlike anything else currently being done with words." --The Guardian

"Hrabal is a most sophisticated novelist, with a gusting humour and hushed tenderness of detail." --Julian Barnes

"What Hrabal has created is an informal history of the indomitable Czech spirit. And perhaps ... the human spirit." --The Times

""Bohumil Hrabal, for all reductive purposes, is the Czech Proust: meaning, he's of the same stirring brilliance, but also meaning that Proust is the French Hrabal. . . Few possess a voice as bold as any one of the many Hrabal has served up. . . What is not okay is to let him slip away from a mainstream eye, and stay reserved for readers looking to 'challenge' themselves." -- Tweed's Magazine of Literature and Art