Chronicles Abroad Books
'The night scene in the city is very striking for its vastness and loneliness. Everybody has gone to rest long before ten o'clock. There are no lights in the enormous buildings; only the stars blazing above, with their astonishing brilliancy, in the blue, peaceful sky.
Prague is a city outside of time. This concentric metropolis mixes the ancient, the merely old, and the modern in a most enigmatic and luminous way. In Prague, the selection of excerpts, essays, and poems perfectly captures this juxtaposition - baroque churches with twenty-five cents beer, gas lamps with neon, Kafka's Castle with cement skyscrapers - in the writing of eleven international authors. This wide-ranging anthology collects unexpected pieces, such as Bruce Chatwin on dwarf and porcelain collecting and Janet Malcolm on a surreal night in modern Prague, as well as the work of Vaclav Havel and Josef Skvorecky, writing about the former Czechoslovakia with candor and humor. Patricia Hampl provides a patchwork look from an overseas admirer, while transplanted Englishwoman Rosemary Kavan writes about her life in Communist Czechoslovakia in the late '40s and early '50s. Each facet of this prismatic city is illuminated and revealed in this richly textured anthology.
In Hong Kong, the last one hundred years and the next one hundred are compressed into one. In its jam-packed streets you can shop for modern clothes day and night, buy the egg of an animal you didn't know existed, or pick your own fish to bring back to a restaurant. The non-stop life of Hong Kong is palpable in its towering skyscrapers, multitudes of cars, and pervasive neon. A city as frenetic and fascinating as this can only inspire the most sophisticated and varied of writing, as evidenced in this anthology, Hong Kong. From Welsh writer Jan Morris's discussion of the "Chineseness" of this (soon-to-be-former) British colony to Somerset Maugham on rickshaws and romance; from John Krich's amusing and horrific dissection of "bargain basement" Hong Kong to Chinese scholar Wang Tao's respectful description of his "exile" from mainland China (in Hong Kong) to a wild romp in the city's underground with John le Carre, this most complicated of Asian cities is vividly captured in the writing of fourteen international authors.
small format hardback with 15 essays & / or excerpts by famous writers about St Petersburg
190 page hardcover book on "tales of the city" of Istanbul. Publisher-Chronicle Books in 1995.