This is a collection of Jan Neruda’s intimate, wry, bittersweet stories of life among the inhabitants of the Little Quarter of nineteenth-century Prague. These finely tuned and varied vignettes established Neruda as the quintessential Czech nineteenth-century realist, the Charles Dickens of a Prague becoming ever more aware of itself as a Czech rather than an Austrian city.

Prague Tales is a classic by a writer whose influence has been acknowledged by generations of Czech writers, including Ivan Klima, who contributes an introduction to this new translation.