Michal Ajvaz ‘De Andere Stad’ / Online Presentation (Tsjechisch Centrum)

On May 28 the Czech Centre Rotterdam in cooperation with the publisher Kleine Uil is organizing an online book-launching of The Other City, by the Czech author Michal Ajvaz, which has been newly translated into Dutch. The translator Tieske Slim will talk with the author about the mysterious literary Prague, the process of translating, and will read fragments from the book.

In this strange and lovely hymn to Prague, Michal Ajvaz repopulates the city of Kafka with ghosts, eccentrics, talking animals, and impossible statues, all lurking on the peripheries of a town so familiar to tourists. The Other City is a guidebook to this invisible, “other Prague”, overlapping the workaday world: a place where libraries can turn into jungles, secret passages yawn beneath our feet, and waves lap at our bedspreads.

Michal Ajvaz was born in 1949 in Prague, his father was a Crimean Karaim and his mother was an Austrian Czech. He published eight works of fiction and several essays. His books have been translated in twenty-one languages and are loved all over the world. The author received numerous prestigious Czech and international prices for his oeuvre.

This event will take place on the Facebook page of the Czech Centre in Rotterdam. Visit the website of the Tsjechisch Centrum to know more about the book-launching, the novel, and the organizers of the event.