Bohumil Hrabal (1914-97) is considered, along with Karel Capek and Milan Kundera, to be one of the great Czech writers of the twentieth century. He won international acclaim for the novels Closely Watched Trains (Northwestern, 1995), Too Loud a Solitude (1992), and I Served the King of England (1989). Tony Liman was born in Czechoslovakia in 1966 and grew up in Toronto. He received his M.F.A. from the University of British Columbia. He is a writer and translator, and his fiction has appeared in several Canadian literary journals. Liman lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.