The Book of Prague: A city in short fiction

As a historic city centre, Prague is perhaps the perfect backdrop for story-telling. With its spectacular, baroque architecture (relatively untouched by either the 20th or 19th centuries), its winding, cobble streets, its Gothic steeples, its rich Bohemian influences... maybe it was inevitable it would become the setting for a renaissance in the fantastical, ‘ground zero’ for magic realism, birthplace of the Kafka-esque. Despite its trapped-in-aspic beauty, however, the city has still been shaped and scarred by the very modern lessons of the 20th century, with its writing being similarly dragged reluctantly into the all-too-real world. In this unique collection of ten of the city's most important authors (several of them previously untranslated), we see the city in a completely new light. Away from the Old Town Square and the winding Vltava River, these stories take us into less-visited corners of Prague: from the steep streets of the proudly edgy Žižkov neighbourhood, to the flood-ravished suburb of Karlín, from the tensions experienced by the city’s Romani community to the dehumanising post-war redevelopment of areas like Libeň. These stories prove that even in a seemingly small and compact city like Prague, there are always sides to a city’s character you would never have imagined. Translated by Alžběta Belánová, Geoffrey Chew, Melvyn Clarke, Graeme Dibble, Andrew Oakland, Justin Quinn, Julia and Peter Sherwood, Paul Wilson and Alex Zucker