Amazon.com description: Product Description: Prague Tales ia a collection of Jan Neruda's intimate, wry, and bitter-sweet 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 realist--considered by many to be the Charles Dickens of nineteenth-century Czechoslovakia. Through Neruda's writings, the reader can fully appreciate Prague's ever increasing awareness of itself as a Czech, rather than an Austrian city. Prague Tales is a classic collection by a writer whose influence hass been acknowledged by generations of writers, including Capek, Kafka, Kundera, Skvorecky, and Ivan Klima, one of the most well-known and highly regarded contemporary Czech writers, who has contributed an Introduction to this new translation.