“One of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century; the scourge of state censors; the gregarious bar hound and lover of gossip, beer, cats and women (in roughly that order). . . . In Hrabal’s work beauty, pity, sorrow and high silliness come tightly braided.”
— Parul Sehgal, New York Times Book Review
“Our very best writer today.”
— Milan Kundera, author of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", Guardian
“Hrabal’s peculiar strength is his ability to entertain the simplest reader and yet be admired by the most intellectual of intellectuals.”
— Josef Škvorecký, author of "The Engineer of Human Souls"
“A great writer.”
— James Wood, London Review of Books
“Arguably the best prose stylist of the twentieth century.”
— Words Without Borders
"A collection of formative fiction from a writer whose work has earned comparison with Joyce and Beckett. . . . The tone throughout is dark comedy, exploring human absurdity and carnality amid a universe that is at best senseless, if not malevolent. 'You insist the world can be perfect only in its totality,' says one character, 'meaning that good and evil are both necessary, otherwise it would come crashing down.' Early work from a writer who merits a larger readership."
— Kirkus Reviews
"In Why I Write?, a motley crew of carousers play drunken pranks and tell each other wild stories. . . . In place of the drab realism that the regime demanded, Hrabal offered dizzying embellishments and dazzling augmentations. He drew early inspiration from the surrealists, and Why I Write? is peppered with references to obscure figures of the movement. But, even in his early stories, he departed from precedent to perfect the distinctive method that he called pabeni, a term that translates to something like palavering: roughly, the kind of meandering chatter that we engage in when we strike up conversations with strangers. . . . The book sometimes glimmers in anticipation of Hrabal’s later virtuosity."
— Becca Rothfeld, New Yorker
“While each of the texts in Why I Write? provides the distinctive pleasure of reading Hrabal, the whole does not cohere as a collection and will be of greatest interest to those whose pathways to this author have been exhausted faster than their passion for reading him.”
— Times Literary Supplement