Last night in the café takes the reader into the submerged world of old Prague. This opulent volume by the renowned Kafka researcher Hartmut Binder documents, on over 600 pages, the entertainment venues of the old imperial city during the final phase of the Habsburg monarchy and the beginning of the Czechoslovak Republic. It presents coffee houses, wine taverns, hotels, chantants, small art stages, theaters, cabarets, cinemas, nightclubs, dance bars, and the famous Théâtre Variété, as well as the now-forgotten artists who performed in these venues, captivating audiences with their shows and charms. From advertisements, program booklets, reviews, reports, memoirs, archival materials, and over 1,000 historical images—many in color and mostly unknown—a city portrait of exotic allure has emerged, where the beauties come to life on yellowed plush, illustrating the atmospheric backdrop of a cultural space that shaped the lives of Kafka and other Prague writers as a genius loci. What the Greenwich Observatory is for timekeeping, Binder is for Kafka research. Stuttgarter Zeitung.