Synopses & Reviews
In this strange and lovely hymn to Prague, Michal Ajvaz repopulates the city of Kafka with ghosts, eccentrics, talking animals, and impossible statues, all lurking on the peripheries of a town so familiar to tourists. The Other City is a guidebook to this invisible, "other Prague," overlapping the workaday world: a place where libraries can turn into jungles, secret passages yawn beneath our feet, and waves lap at our bedspreads. Heir to the tradition and obsessions of Jorge Luis Borges, as well as the long and distinguished line of Czech fantasists, Ajvaz's Other City--his first novel to be translated into English--is the emblem of all the worlds we are blind to, being caught in our own ways of seeing.
Synopsis
"Reading such a world means stepping inside it, letting it infect you, bruise, scrape, poison and obsess you."--Jonathan Bolton, CONTEXT
About the Author
Michal Ajvaz is a Czech novelist, essayist, poet, and translator. In 2005, he was awarded the Jaroslav Seifert Prize for his novel Prázdné ulice (Empty Streets). He is a researcher at Prague's Center for Theoretical Studies. In addition to fiction, he has published an essay on Derrida, a book-length meditation on Borges, and a philosophical study on the act of seeing.Gerald Turner has been translating modern Czech and Slovak writing for over thirty years. Prior to 1990 he translated, under the pseudonym of A. G. Brain, many banned authors, including Václav Havel, Karel Pecka, and Ludvík Vaculík. His translations include Europeana by Patrik Ouredník, for which he received the US PEN Translation Award in 2004.