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FEATURE THE BOOK OF PRAGUE


Reading Prague


TEXT Ra Page


s a publisher specialising in that wholly underrated commodity, the short story, I’m forever amazed by its ability to whisk the reader off to the most far-flung


places in the shortest space of time. Short stories travel light, moving quickly and effortlessly across cultural, linguistic and political boundaries and setting you down firmly, and instantly, in new settings, with new points of view. That is why editing an anthology series like Comma’s Reading the City books is a continual treat, full of unexpected insights, contradictions and multiplicities of perspectives that upend any previous expectations I might have had about a place. With 10 stories, by 10 different writers, each anthology maps out different regions and communities in each city, as well as differ historical moments in the city’s recent (or not so recent) past.


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For a long time I’ve wanted to take the serie to Prague: it is, after all, ground zero for magic realism, birthplace of the Kafa-esque—that unique strain of surrealism that transformed the relatively modern form of the short story, and turned it back on itself, into an engagement with the fantastical. What better setting than Prague for the fantastical


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THE PRAGUE POET LAUREATE PETR BORKOVEC ALSO FEATURES


VERONIKA BENDOVÁ HAS CONTRUBUTED TO THE BOOK OF PRAGUE


to be reborn with its spectacular, diverse architecture (relatively untouched by either of the world wars), its winding, cobbled streets, its myriad of towers and


RA PAGE IS C.E.O. AND FOUNDER OF COMMA PRESS. THE BOOK OF    OCTOBER AND EDITED BY IVANA MYŠKOVÁ AND JAN ZIKMUND


spires, its majestic castle… But this trapped-in-aspic beauty hides other more recent histories that visitors to the city might not be familiar with. This anthology brings us beyond the Old Town and introduces us to districts like Libeň, as remembered here in its post-war glory by Bohumil Hrabal (described by the New York Times as “one of the great prose stylists of the 20th century”), and Žižkov, with its vibrant but oft-mistreated Romani community, and to less likely landmarks like the TV tower insensitively planted in the middle of the old Jewish Cemetery—according to VirtualTourist the ugliest still-standing building in the world! It is only out in these parts of the city, away from the tourist trail, that we get to know the real Prague, with all its 20th-century scars— from the trauma that still lingers from Czechoslovakia’s acquiescence to Nazi Germany, to the prolonged hardships of the Soviet era, to the challenging transition to democracy. These are the histories visitors to the city need to know, and that need to be preserved. And sometimes the only place to preserve them is in stories.


© Radek Brousil


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