Published as part of Bloomsbury’s “The Writer and The City” series, John Banville’s

(2003) can be considered a work of travel literature, albeit with frequent deviations from the subject material of general works in this genre. In this book the author recalls his several journeys to the city he describes as “mysterious, jumbled, fantastical, absurd” (9) over a period of roughly twenty years, his first visit being in the early 1980s.

is Banville’s first work of non-fiction and, like the other texts in the series, this work is an atypical piece of travel writing and defies simple description. Banville merges fiction with fact, scholarly rigour with playful parody, and earnestness with comic insincerity as he writes about the…

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Citation: Boyle, Kevin. "Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 September 2013 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=13222, accessed 22 November 2024.]