The Other City - by Michal Ajvaz (Paperback)

About the Book

"Reading such a world means stepping inside it, letting it infect you, bruise, scrape, poison and obsess you." Jonathan Bolton, CONTEXT

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Reading such a world means stepping inside it, letting it infect you, bruise, scrape, poison and obsess you." -Jonathan Bolton, CONTEXT

"Ajvaz's novel is a gorgeous matryoshka doll of unreason, enigma and nonsense--truly weird and compelling." --Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Novelist, poet, critic, and translator Michal Ajvaz was born into a Russian family in Prague in 1949. He studied at Prague's Charles University and works at the Prague Centre for Theoretical Studies; in addition to his fiction and poetry, he's published monographs on Derrida and Borges. He received the Jaroslav Siefert Prize in 2005 for his novel Prázdné ulice (Empty Streets).

Gerald Turner has been one of the worlds foremost Czech and Slovak translators since the 70s. He has been shortlisted for the Weidenfeld Translation Prize of the British Translators' Association and received the US Pen Translation Award in 2004. He was the private translator to President Václav Havel from 2004-2011.