Prague has one of the richest literary identities of any European city, and the reading list is correspondingly good.
The Trial and The Castle by Franz Kafka — Kafka was a German-speaking Jew born in Prague, and the city's bureaucratic labyrinths, its bridges between German and Czech cultures, and its specific atmosphere of suspended menace permeate everything he wrote. Reading Kafka before visiting makes you see things in the streets you would otherwise miss.
The Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Škvorecký — A Czech jazz musician and writer reflects on Prague from exile in Canada, moving between the German occupation, the Communist takeover, and the 1968 invasion. The most honest and funny account of what it was actually like to live through those decades.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera — Set in Prague during and after the 1968 Prague Spring, Kundera's novel uses the invasion as a backdrop for a meditation on love, freedom, and history. Overread but not overrated; the passages about Czech life under normalization are exact and melancholy.
City Sister Silver by Jáchym Topol — A novel of post-1989 Prague, when the city was simultaneously exhilarating and chaotic, a place where everything was possible and nothing worked. Topol captures the energy and the grotesqueness of the transition better than anyone else.
Prague in Black and Gold by Peter Demetz — A cultural and political history of Prague from its origins to the late 20th century. Dense but rewarding; the chapters on the interwar republic and the Nazi occupation are particularly strong.