The Witch of Prague

Prague: a woman who has learned to keep a man asleep for years without ageing, a Wanderer looking for a face he lost, and a hunchbacked physiologist who wants to know how she does it. Crawford lived above Sorrento and wrote more than forty books at a pace his publishers could not keep up with; this 1891 novel uses hypnotism and the Jewish quarter, and Prague itself is the best character in it. Ten paintings of moonlit churches, snowbound cemeteries, and old Prague streets, from Caspar David Friedrich to Antonín Slavíček, give the city its own visual language.