Michal Ajvaz

The Other City

Trans. Gerald Turner
The Other City The Other City
Dalkey Archive Press, 2009, 148 pp
Language: English
Foreign rights:
Dana Blatná Literary Agency
http://www.dbagency.cz
blatna@dbagency.cz
Read an excerpt:
English
Prose  |  English sample translation available

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 to which our own routine eyes blind us.

Information about the original Czech edition

Druhé město

Other selected published translations (7)

Другой город Russian

Moderstwo w hotelu Intercontinental. Powrót starego warana. Inne miasto Polish

En Annan Stad Swedish

Den andre byen Norwegian

L'Altra Praga Italian

L'autre ville French

Kitas miestas Lithuanian

Dalkey Archive Press, 2009, 148 pp
Language: English
Foreign rights:
Dana Blatná Literary Agency
http://www.dbagency.cz
blatna@dbagency.cz
Read an excerpt:
English