"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"