Items related to Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (Writer and the...
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 Hradčany 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.
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About the Author:
John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of twenty-five novels, some of them under the pen name Benjamin Black, and his acclaimed works include The Book of Evidence, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and The Sea, which won the prize in 2005. He has also been awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, among others. Banville lives in Dublin.
From Booklist:
Here is the latest installment in Bloomsbury's fascinating Writer in the City series, which matches well-known writers with cities with which they are intimately familiar. Banville has not written a guidebook but rather, in his own words, "a handful of recollections, variations on a theme"--snapshots, if you like, of the city's past and present. The book begins with the author's first visit to Prague, during the cold war, but as we go deeper into the book, we also go deeper into the city's history. Banville flicks so effortlessly between past and present that Prague soon appears as a collage, effectively lifting the city's rich and visible past out of time and bringing it to life once again, as the author visits the birthplace of Franz Kafka or steps inside a cathedral whose construction was begun in 1344. While most travel memoirs clearly distinguish between the way a place is today and the way it used to be, Banville's perspective is somewhat different. This, he says, is Prague, past and present, the way it has always been. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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- PublisherBloomsbury USA
- Publication date2015
- ISBN 10 163286374X
- ISBN 13 9781632863744
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages256
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Prague Pictures Portraits Of A City
Published by
Bloomsbury Press, NY
(2015)
ISBN 10: 163286374X
ISBN 13: 9781632863744
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Hardcover
First Edition
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Dust Jacket Condition: None Issued. 1st Edition. This is a New and Unread copy of the first edition (1st printing)-The Bloomsbury Press Edition. From the "Writer in The City" series. Originally published in 2004. No dust jacket issued. The covers have a Color plate of an older Prague on the front cover. There is a map on both the front and rear endpapers. Seller Inventory # 054434
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