The Jingle Bell Principle

Better known as Czechoslovakia's finest poet, Miroslav Holub is also a superb prose stylist. The fifty-five `essaylets'...each forty-three lines in length, first appeared in the magazine Vim. Adhering to the magazine's strictures on length, Holub invented a new genre that imposes additional limits on the arts limits that are spatial, social, political, and spiritual...[The essaylets] touch upon every aspect of man's search for morality in a hostile world and are as poignant and probing as his poetry."" - World Literature Today. ""Holub is actually well known as a scientist, too, and it is this, along with his awareness of the political realities around him, that save his work from being the sort of studied vapidity that emasculates so much Western verse."" - Booklist.