This autobiography in stories, When Eve Was Naked, 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 Skvorecky's alter-ego Danny Smiricky, seven-year-old Danny falls in love for the first time; at sixteen he hides in a railway station and watches as his Jewish teacher is herded onto a train and taken away; and in 1968, as Russian tanks rolled into Prague, Skvorecky flees Czechoslovakia, taking Danny with him. In the collection's final stories, Danny begins his tenure...

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."

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.

Hrabal's postwar classic about a young man's coming of age in German-occupied Czechoslovakia is among his most beloved and accessible works. Closely Watched Trains is the subtle and poetic portrait of Milos Hrma, a timid young railroad apprentice who insulates himself with fantasy against a reality filled with cruelty and grief. Day after day as he watches trains fly by, he torments himself with the suspicion that he himself is being watched and with fears of impotency. Hrma finally affirms his manhood and, with a sense of peace and purpose he has never known before, heroically confronts a...

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."