According to Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal was Czechoslovakia’s greatest writer. Archipelago is pleased to present the first English translation of his novel Harlequin's Millions with a translation by Stacey Knect.

Harlequin’s Millions is peopled with eccentric, unforgettable characters that live in a home for the elderly and reminisce about their lives and their changing country. Poised on the threshold between joy and melancholy, this novel allows us into the mind of a woman coming to terms with the passing of time.

“Hrabal likes to heat his caught enigmas, his snatches of story and strange facts, so that they begin to emit a magical vapour… The invitation, we feel, is not simply for the reader to see these hanging torsos, but to imagine someone imagining them, which is a little different.” 
–James Wood, The London Review of Books

BOHUMIL HRABAL (1914-1997) is the author of comic, nearly surreal tales about workers, eccentrics, and nonconformists. His writings were banned after the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1969. After his country achieved independence, Hrabal’s underground works from the 1970s were at last published there.

STACEY KNECHT has translated works by Hugo Claus and Marcel Möring. She lives in the Netherlands and runs the literary website The Ledge.

CALEB CRAIN’S most recent novel, Necessecary Errors, depicts the life of a budding writer in Prague just after the Velvet Revolution. He is also the translator of Eda Kriseová’s biography of the Czech playwright, politician, and philosopher Václav Havel.

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