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The Little Town Where Time Stood Still contains two linked narratives by the incomparable Bohumil Hrabal, whom Milan Kundera has described as Czechoslovakias greatest writer. Cutting It Short is set before World War II in a small country town, and it relates the scandalizing escapades of Maryka, the flamboyant wife of Francin, who manages the local brewery. Maryka drinks. She rides a bicycle, letting her long hair fly. She butchers pigs, frolics in blood, and leads on the local butcher. Shes a Madame Bovary without apologies driven to keep up with the new fast-paced mechanized modern world that is obliterating whatever sleepy pieties are left over from the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Little Town Where Time Stood Still is told by Maryka and Francins son and concerns the exploits of his Uncle Pepin, who holds his own against the occupying Nazis but succumbs to silence as the new postWorld War II Communist order cements its colorless control over daily life.