Two novellas ("The Bass Saxophone" and "Emoke") by a banned Czech writer who won the 1980 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Canadian Governor General's 1985 Award for Fiction. The st
This autobiography in stories takes us through a most remarkable life, from the innocence of prewar Prague through the horrors of the Nazi occupation and World War II. In the title story, narrated by
The witness in 1948 to a baffling event labled by Catholic townspeople as a miracle and by the Communist Party as a fraud, cynical Czech Danny Smiricky finds himself drawn into an investigation of the
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
The Engineer of Human Souls is a labyrinthine comic novelthat investigates the journey and plight of novelist Danny Smiricky, aCzech immigrant to Canada. As the novel begins, he is a professor ofAmer
