Total Fears: Selected Letters to Dubenka
The publication of this book marks a major event ... As an addition to English Hrabalia, Total Fears is invaluable, and unlikely to be matched for some time. — The Prague PostIn Total Fears, Hrabal glancingly commends Freud's writing about comedy and jokes, and calls it "typically Central European, and especially typical of Prague." [...] This is blocked humour about blocked people. Hrabal, in Freud's terms, is a great humorist. — London Review of BooksBohumil Hrabal at his most ecstatic, in the sense of almost religious fervor, full of the "mystic vision" of Eastern European writers. They are his dark night of the soul, his "Wasteland." Written from 1989 to 1992 (when Hrabal was 75), they are the sum of his fear and his shame. — Los Angeles Times