Böcker av Josef Skvorecky

Here is a wonderfully imagined picture of a little known period in American musical history. In 1892, at the height of his prodigious powers, Antonin Dvorak was persuaded to leave his native Bohemia to come to New York to be director of the National Conservatory for Music. In this exuberant novel, Josef Skvorecky tells the story of Dvorak's utterly requited love affair with young America, the anthem of which is his famous Symphony in E Minor, "From the New World."

In the face of Europe's rising nationalism and intolerance, this timely anthology by Czech writers addresses a key issue for today. The courage of Czech writers is legendary. During the Cold War they kept their nation's conscience alive by clandestine publishing while imprisoned as "dissidents" or collecting garbage, washing windows or selling fish as "non-persons," and then they took the lead in the Velvet Revolution of 1989 that overthrew communism.In Europe and the West today - with its rising nationalism and political extremism - subtlety, humour and sharp intelligence are needed more than ever, and this volume of stories, poetry, essays and drama showcases some of the best Czech writing on these important topics. The volume also lends insight into the role of Czech writers during two of the darkest periods of Central European history: the struggles against fascism and communism.

A pensive, conscience-stricken man driven to melancholy by the fiendish truths of murder, the Czechoslovak policeman Lieutenant Boruvka is a notable new member of the brilliant-eccentric-detective literary tradition. Twelve bizarre tales-to be read as a continuous account-involve theatrical people, musicians, and mountaineers, who lead the lieutenant, and the reader, on an ingenious chase through the paths of crime.

A clergyman named Ronald A. Knox once set forth a set of rules for writing detective fiction. In ten new stories (two featuring Lieutenant Boruvka), a crime occurs that violates one of Father Knox's rules, thus serving up a double challenge: Who dunnit? and Which rule was broken?

This energetic and hilarious novel is made even more important by the current final thawing of the long, Communist winter in Czechoslovakia.

The Cowards (1958) is Josef Skvorecky's blackly comic tale of post-war politics that was immediately banned on publication. In 1945, in Kostelec,Danny is playing saxophone for the best jazz band in Czechoslovakia. Their trumpeter has just got out of a concentration camp, their bass player is only allowed in the band since he owns the bass, and the love of Danny's life is in love with somebody else. But Danny despairs most about the bourgeoisie patriots in his town playing at revolution in the face of the approaching Red Army - not least because it ruins the band's chance of any good gigs.

Things looked very black for Lieutenant Boruvka in The End of Lieutenant Boruvka. But in this, the fourth and (perhaps) final volume in the series, the sad-eyed detective turns up again, this time in Canada.

THE ENGINEER OF HUMAN SOULS spins its own story from the torn entrails of Central Europe. yet what emerges is comedy - clack, grimacing and explosively funny, as peculiarly middle European as the despairing wit of prague's own Franz Kafka' Time