Josef Skvorecky's novels have established him as a major author around the world, but his less well known essays include some of his most stimulating writing. Talkin' Moscow Blues is the first-ever collection of Skvorecky's essays, reviews, and interviews. Here are deeply personal stories about the friends and events that have shaped his beliefs and his writing; thoughtful examinations of the nature of art, politics, and freedom; reviews of writers such as Faulkner and Kafka, and filmmakers Jiri Menzel and Francis Coppola. And sprinkled throughout are Skvorecky's lively commentaries on the foibles of both East and West. Skvorecky has lived under the spectrum of political regimes - from the rightist oppression of the Nazis to the leftist oppression of the Soviets - and he has resisted the influence of both sides. As an amateur musician in Czechoslovakia he slipped verboten lyrics past the Nazi censor and played "degenerate" jazz with a lookout at the door; as a lifelong film devotee and friend of top filmmakers he saw scripts written and rewritten to match the ebb and flow of party politics; as a writer he had his first major work, The Cowards, banned and confiscated by the authorities. As a Czech he is exiled for life, but as a Canadian he has found the freedom to express his thoughts and opinions, both in fiction and in non-fiction. (1988)

Josef Skvorecký was born in 1924 in Nachod, Bohemia, Czechoslovakia. He received his PhD in philosophy from Charles University in Prague in 1951. His earliest works, including The Cowards (1958), were banned by communist censors. He published novels, short stories and film scripts between 1963 and 1968, during a shift to more liberal political climate. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Skvorecký and his wife, Zdena Salivarová emigrated to Canada in 1969. Together with his wife, he ran 68 Publishers, which published, in both Czech and English translations, books that we banned in Communist Czechoslovakia. By the fall of the Soviet Union, 68 published had published over 220 works. Skvorecky published many books, including novels, poetry, non-fiction, as well as for film and television, among them The Engineer of Human Souls (1984), which received the Governor General's Award for fiction. Skvorecký was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, and was awarded the Order of the White Lion in the Czech Republic in 1990. Josef Skvorecký died in 2012.

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