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.

This parable of censorship and the modern state centers on Hanta, a trash collector whose habit of salvaging and reading discarded books has brought him both the richness of the classics and the ridicule of his boss

Describes the Russian master's life in a full portrait that describes his nightmarish childhood, his early twenties as a doctor and a writer and his struggle with tuberculosis, and his last years when he fell in love for the first time