The Other City
By Michal Ajvaz
1993
First Published
3.67
Average Rating
194
Number of Pages
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.
Avg Rating
3.67
Number of Ratings
1,030
5 STARS
26%
4 STARS
34%
3 STARS
26%
2 STARS
10%
1 STARS
4%
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Author
Michal Ajvaz
Author · 8 books
Michal Ajvaz is a Czech novelist, essayist, poet, and translator. He is a researcher at Prague's Center for Theoretical Studies. In addition to fiction, he has published an essay on Derrida, a book-length meditation on Borges, and a philosophical study on the act of seeing. In 2005, he was awarded the Jaroslav Seifert Prize for his novel Prázdné ulice (Empty Streets).
