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 Klíma, who contributes an introduction to this new translation.

Jan Neruda, Czech poet, novelist, essayist and journalist (1834-1891) was both radical and European in outlook. Born of a poor family in 1834, he knew at first hand the life he evoked in Prague Tales. The stories in this collection date from the 1860s and 70s and reflect Neruda’s enthusiasm for feuilletons, vivid sketches on the border between journalism and fiction.