Prague, Vol. 2 Book

Prague, as every traveler will tell you, is a wonderful town, full of surprises and visual delights. It is full of improbable and heart catching characters as well, as many Czech writers can introduce you to. Prague: A Traveller's Literary Companion from Whereabouts Press provides a superb selection. In short readings you can go with Franz Kafka in late night companionship to the Charles Bridge in "Description of a Struggle, or watch on as Bohumil Hrabal's "ugly little man" finds himself as a beer waiter and a much sought after lover in the "Hotel Paříž" in the 1940s.

This is one of the strongest of the Whereabouts volumes I've read, though all of their fine list are must-carries when on the move. Of the 22 authors included, most will recognize only Kafka's name, though a few will know Jaroslav Hašek as the author of the not famed enough anti-war novel, The Good Soldier Švejk. In a life lived almost exactly the years of Kafka's, the two could not have had more opposite temperaments yet both were alive to creating characters caught in conditions not of their own making. His contribution, "A Psychiatric Mystery," is a tickling account of such a man. Leaning over the Charles Bridge rail to locate the sound of a man he thinks is in trouble he is 'rescued' by a passer-by and the police from committing suicide, the reality of which is proven by the fierceness of his resistance to being rescued. - See more at: