Prague Pictures

From one of the foremost chroniclers of the modern European experience, a panoramic view of a city that has seduced and bewitched visitors for centuries.

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The fourth book in Bloomsbury's Writer and the City series.
Prague is the magic capital of Europe. Since the days of Emperor Rudolf II, "devotee of the stars and cultivator of the spagyric art", who in the late 1500s summoned alchemists and magicians from all over the world to his castle on Hradeany hill, it has been a place of mystery and intrigue. Wars, revolutions, floods, the imposition of Soviet communism, and even the depredations of the tourist boom after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 could not destroy the unique atmosphere of this beautiful, proud, and melancholy city on the Vltava. John Banville traces Prague's often tragic history and portrays the people who made it: the emperors and princes, geniuses and charlatans, heroes and scoundrels. He also paints a portrait of the Prague of today, reveling in its newfound freedoms, eager to join the European Community and at the same time suspicious of what many Praguers see as yet another totalitarian takeover. He writes of his first visit to the city, in the depths of the Cold War, and of subsequent trips there, of the people he met, the friends he made, the places he came to know.
John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of twelve novels, including The Book of Evidence, which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize, and Kepler, which won the Guardian Prize for Fiction. He is literary editor of The Irish Times and lives in Dublin with his wife and two sons.
Praise for John Banville: "Ireland's finest contemporary novelist."-The Economist
"Mr. Banville is that rare writer who can pack all five senses into one declarative sentence."-The Wall Street Journal
"As remarkable a literary voice as any to come out of Ireland, Joyce and Beckett notwithstanding."-San Francis