Prague (Chronicles Abroad)

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.