Prague: Tales of the City

by John Miller (Editor), Kristen Miller (Editor)

Prague is a city outside of time. This concentric metropolis mixes the ancient, the merely old, and the modern in a most enigmatic and luminous way. In Prague, the selection of excerpts, essays, and poems perfectly captures this juxtaposition - baroque churches with twenty-five cents beer, gas lamps with neon, Kafka's Castle with cement skyscrapers - in the writing of eleven international authors. This wide-ranging anthology collects unexpected pieces, such as Bruce Chatwin on dwarf and porcelain collecting and Janet Malcolm on a surreal night in modern Prague, as well as the work of Vaclav Havel and Josef Skvorecky, writing about the former Czechoslovakia with candor and humor. Patricia Hampl provides a patchwork look from an overseas admirer, while transplanted Englishwoman Rosemary Kavan writes about her life in Communist Czechoslovakia in the late '40s and early '50s. Each facet of this prismatic city is illuminated and revealed in this richly textured anthology.

contents
Article 202 / Vaclav Havel --
The castle / Franz Kafka --
Utz / Bruce Chatwin --
The house of Doctor Faust / Alois Jirasek --
Bohemia / Ingeborg Bachmann --
Pirates / Josef Skvorecky --
A night in Prague / Janet Malcolm --
The good soldier S[c]hweik / Jaroslav Hasek --
Freedom at a price / Rosemary Kavan --
The book of laughter and forgetting / Milan Kundera.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1994

About the author

John Miller has edited a number of intriguing anthologies for Chronicle Books, including Lust and White Rabbit. He runs Big Fish Books, a packaging company in San Francisco.

Reviews

[Wendi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mini-buffet of Czech writers and their short stories/ excerpts.

[Kecia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prague is a magical city. In time it seeps through your pores and changes your life. This is a nice little collection of writings from the city's most well known citizens...Havel, Kafka, Kundera. Recommneded reading if you plan to travel there.