House of the Nine Devils

Drawn mostly from Johannes Urzidil's celebrated collection 'The Lost Beloved', this edition includes some of most well-known Bohemian tales. The stories span a mythical Prague of centuries past to the late Habsburg city with its genteel veneer masking seething ethnic tensions underneath to the terrifying prospect of having to flee Nazi occupation by relying on a former Czech schoolmate to keep hidden. Autobiographical in nature, many of the stories blur the border between reportage and fiction, such as an account of visiting Gavrilo Princip wasting away in prison in Terezín after his assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and a WWI army deserter disrupting a night at Café Arco, which was frequented by the Prague Circle of Brod, Kafka, and Werfel, as well as Urzidil as the group's youngest member.