Loving Venice

For lovers of Venice, Petr Kral's Loving Venice (Aimer Venise) is a poetic and deeply-felt portrait of this eternally fascinating city, that delves behind its grand facades. Petr Kral's encounter with the city of Doges is a love-letter to a place that arouses strong and often contradictory emotions but rarely indifference. His ethereal prose carries us through the floating city as if exploring the body of a familiar, yet inscrutable, lover: "Even in the depths of her private, inner frisson, Venice is still open to the world's great perspectives, enticing them into her secret recesses and borne along by the touch of their breath." Petr Kral's Loving Venice is translated from the French by Christopher Moncrieff and published by Pushkin Press. Petr Kral, born in Prague in 1941, was a leading member of the Czech surrealist movement, studied cinema and moved to Paris in 1968. A poet, essayist and screenwriter, he has lived in Prague since 2006. His books Working Knowledge (2008) and In Search of the Essence of Place (2012) are also published by Pushkin Press.