Great reading that provides a sense of the city, from the Traveler online Ultimate Travel Library.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera (1984)
The tangled-up lives of a surgeon, his wife, and his mistress, played out against the 1968 Prague Spring and the subsequent Soviet-led invasion that ended it. Adapted as a movie in 1988 starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche. Also look for Kundera’s The Joke (1967) and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980).
Summer Meditations, by Vaclav Havel (1992)
Havel wrote this highly readable account shortly after the 1989 Velvet Revolution. Meditations not only on those historic events, but also on the nature of politics and morality. Also worth looking for: To the Castle and Back (2007) and Disturbing the Peace (1990).
The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka (1915)
A traveling salesman wakes up one morning to discover he’s been transformed into a giant bug. He loses the ability to communicate with his family and ultimately expires alone and ashamed. Franz Kafka’s extended short story of alienation and isolation is a modern classic. The author of The Trial and The Castle spent nearly his entire life in Prague, and while Prague is rarely if ever mentioned in his writings, it seeps out on every page.
The Good Soldier Svejk, by Jaroslav Hasek (1923)
Timeless classic from the First World War about a guileless Czech soldier named Svejk, whose boundless enthusiasm for the ruling Habsburgs has even the Austrians wondering if he’s not really nuts.
I Served the King of England, by Bohumil Hrabal (1989)
A comic masterpiece by the best-loved Czech writer of his generation. Follows the ups and downs of a height-impaired hotel waiter who rises to fabulous wealth under the Nazi occupation in World War II only to lose it all in the Communist takeover after. Adapted as a movie in 2006 by Oscar-winning director Jiri Menzel.
Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968, by Heda Margolius Kovaly (1997)
“A personal tour of Czechoslovakia's darkest years.”—Douglas Lytle, author, Pink Tanks and Velvet Hangovers: An American in Prague. Heda Margolius Kovaly, a Jew from Prague, had the misfortune of being caught between Hitler and Stalin. Sent with her family to the Lodz ghetto in Poland, she ended up in Auschwitz. She survived and later went on to marry a Communist, who in the 1950s was executed in a show trial.
The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague, by Timothy Garton Ash (1990)
Oxford University historian Garton Ash was both an observer to and participant in the East European revolutions of 1989. This is the best account of those historic events and that fateful year.
