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'A superb, haunting, clotted mad masterpiece.'- John Banville, The Observer This unique cultural history attempts to go beyond the tourist clich of Prague as the 'golden city' to bring out all the mystery, ambiguity, gloom, lethargy and hidden fascination of the city on the Vltava. Ripellino slips into the style of melodrama and ghost stories, the anecdotes of the enchanted traveller and the outlandish bad taste of beer-teller tales to bring out the sorcery of the Bohemian capital in a mixture of fact and fiction.
A treasure house of Gothic, baroque and modernist architecture, Prague is also a city of icons and symbols: statues, saints and signs reveal a turbulent history of religious and cultural conflict. As Kafka's nightmare city and home of the Good Soldier Svejk, the Czech capital also produced two of the twentieth century's emblematic writers. Richard Burton explores this metropolis of theatrical allusion, in which politics and drama have always been intertwined. His interpretation of the city's cultural past and present encompasses opera and rock music, puppetry and cinema, surrealism and socialist realism.
For readers of VE Schwab and The Witcher, science and magic clash in atmospheric gaslight-era Prague. In the quiet streets of Prague all manner of otherworldly creatures lurk in the shadows. Unbeknownst to its citizens, their only hope against the tide of predators are the dauntless lamplighters - a secret elite of monster hunters whose light staves off the darkness each night. Domek Myska leads a life teeming with fraught encounters with the worst kind of evil: pijavica, bloodthirsty and soulless vampiric creatures. Despite this, Domek find solace in his moments spent in the company of his friend, the clever and beautiful Lady Ora Fischer - a widow with secrets of her own. When Domek finds himself stalked by the spirit of the White Lady - a ghost who haunts the baroque halls of Prague castle – he stumbles across the sentient essence of a will-o'-the-wisp captured in a mysterious container. Now, as it's bearer, Domek wields its power, but the wisp, known for leading travellers to their deaths, will not be so easily controlled. After discovering a conspiracy amongst the pijavice that could see them unleash terror on the daylight world, Domek finds himself in a race against those who aim to twist alchemical science for their own dangerous gain.
The Magic Lantern is one of those rare books that capture history in the making, written by an author who was witness to some of the most remarkable moments that marked the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. Timothy Garton Ash was there in Warsaw, on 4 June, when the communist government was humiliated by Solidarity in the first semi-free elections since the Second World War. He was there in Budapest, twelve days later, when Imre Nagy - thirty-one years after his execution - was finally given his proper funeral. He was there in Berlin, as the Wall opened. And most remarkable of all, he was there in Prague, in the back rooms of the Magic Lantern theatre, with Václav Havel and the members of Civic Forum, as they made their 'Velvet Revolution'.
The extraordinary heritage of Prague has meant that the city is now regarded as one of the artistic and cultural capitals of the world. The turbulent history of the city is reflected in the range and diversity of buildings discussed in this text: from its baroque churches and palaces to the state offices and housing projects of the post-1945 communist era. The guide covers all aspects of Prague's development since its early years, through its periods of both power and decline from the 15th to the 20th century. Particular attention is paid to the architecture of the last 100 years. Since the democratic revolution of 1989, the city has once again become a place of pilgrimage for those interested in architecture and design. This book covers some of the most recent architectural projects to be planned in the city.
Since its foundation in the ninth century Prague has punched way above its weight to become a fulcrum of European culture. The city’s most illustrious figures in the fields of music, literature and film are well known: Mozart staged the premiere of his opera Don Giovanni here; in the early twentieth century Franz Kafka was at the forefront of the city’s intellectual life, while later writers such as Milan Kundera and film directors such as Milos Forman chronicled Prague’s fortunes under communism. Yet the city has a cultural heritage that runs far deeper than Kafka museums and Mozart-by-candlelight concerts. It encompasses the avant-garde punk group Plastic People of the Universe, the “new wave” film directors of the 1960s who made their striking movies in the city’s famed Barrandov studios, and artists such as Alfons Mucha and Frantisek Kupka whose revolutionary canvases fomented Art Nouveau and abstract art at the dawn of the twentieth century. Beyond art galleries, concert halls and cinemas the history of Prague has been one of invasion and sometimes brutal oppression. The great German chancellor Otto von Bismarck once commented that “whoever controls Prague, controls mid-Europe” and a succession of imperialist powers have taken this advice to heart, most recently Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Opposition has taken many forms, from the religious reformer Jan Hus in the fifteenth century to playwright and dissident Václav Havel, whose elevation to the Czechoslovak presidency in 1990 made him a symbol of the rebirth of democracy in Eastern Europe. In this book Andrew Beattie also reflects on the modern city, where bold new buildings such as Frank Gehry’s “Dancing House” rub shoulders with monuments from the Gothic and Baroque eras such as the Charles Bridge and St. Vitus’ Cathedral. He considers the suburbs too, home to world-renowned soccer and ice hockey teams, gleaming shopping centers and grim communist-era apartment blocks that are often home to Vietnamese, Romany and Muslim minority groups who live in a city with a growing international outlook. The Prague he reveals is an increasingly confident and diverse city of the new Europe.
A New York Times bestseller. Once a city of enormous wealth and culture, in its day Prague was home to emperors, alchemists, astronomers. When music student Sarah Weston finds herself with a summer job at Prague Castle cataloging Beethoven's manuscripts, she has no idea how dangerous her life is about to become. Prague is a threshold, Sarah is warned, and it is steeped in blood. It's not long after Sarah arrives that things start to go wrong. Her mentor, who was working at the castle, is thought to have committed suicide. Then Sarah begins to discover cryptic notes from him; could they be warnings? Following the clues about Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved", Sarah gets into more trouble than she could have reasonably expected. Arrests, sex and a touch of alchemy take Sarah on an exciting and occasionally dangerous trip. Along the way she catches the attention of a four-hundred-year-old dwarf, the handsome Prince Max, and a powerful U.S. senator with secrets she will do anything to hide. City of Dark Magic could be called a rom-com paranormal suspense novel, or it could simply be called one of the most entertaining novels of the year. Magnus Flyte is a pseudonym for the writing duo of Meg Howrey and Christina Lynch. Meg Howrey is the author of the novels The Cranes Dance and Blind Sight and her non-fiction has been published in Vogue. She lives in Los Angeles. Christina Lynch is a television writer and former Milan correspondent for W Magazine. She lives near Sequoia National Park in California. textpublishing.com.au 'This deliciously madcap novel has it all: murder in Prague, time travel, a misanthropic Beethoven, tantric sex, and a dwarf with attitude. I salute you, Magnus Flyte!' Conan O'Brien 'A comical, rollicking and sexy thriller.' Huffington Post 'The most wickedly enchanting novel I've ever read and also the funniest. A Champagne magnum of intrigue and wit, this book sparkles from beginning to end.' Anne Fortier, bestselling author of Juliet
" ... Demetz begins with the intriguing myths about Prague's origins--told and retold by generations of artists--contrasting them with confirmed archaeological truths about the site's pre-Roman settlements. He weaves together the colorful strands of Prague's literary traditions (Latin, Czech, German, and Jewish) with the story of its scintillating political and cultural advances, and focuses on key moments in its multicultural life: under King Charles, when it was the capital of the Holy Roman Empire; in the turbulent years of the Hussite rebellion; under Emperor Rudolf II, during the Renaissance, when it was home to Europe's best rationalists and most famous occultists; in the time of Mozart; and in the ages of revolutionary nationalism and of T.G. Masaryk, heroic first president of Czechoslovakia. Throughout, Demetz shows how Czechs, Germans, Italians, and Jews hve lived and worked together in Prague for a thousand years ..."--Jacket.
The story of modernity told through a cultural history of twentieth-century Prague Setting out to recover the roots of modernity in the boulevards, interiors, and arcades of the "city of light," Walter Benjamin dubbed Paris "the capital of the nineteenth century." In this eagerly anticipated sequel to his acclaimed Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History, Derek Sayer argues that Prague could well be seen as the capital of the much darker twentieth century. Ranging across twentieth-century Prague's astonishingly vibrant and always surprising human landscape, this richly illustrated cultural history describes how the city has experienced (and suffered) more ways of being modern than perhaps any other metropolis. Located at the crossroads of struggles between democratic, communist, and fascist visions of the modern world, twentieth-century Prague witnessed revolutions and invasions, national liberation and ethnic cleansing, the Holocaust, show trials, and snuffed-out dreams of "socialism with a human face." Yet between the wars, when Prague was the capital of Europe's most easterly parliamentary democracy, it was also a hotbed of artistic and architectural modernism, and a center of surrealism second only to Paris. Focusing on these years, Sayer explores Prague's spectacular modern buildings, monuments, paintings, books, films, operas, exhibitions, and much more. A place where the utopian fantasies of the century repeatedly unraveled, Prague was tailor-made for surrealist André Breton's "black humor," and Sayer discusses the way the city produced unrivaled connoisseurs of grim comedy, from Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hasek to Milan Kundera and Václav Havel. A masterful and unforgettable account of a city where an idling flaneur could just as easily be a secret policeman, this book vividly shows why Prague can teach us so much about the twentieth century and what made us who we are.