In the six tales that make up The Swell Season, Josef Skvorecky recounts the frustrated desires of young Danny Smiricky, a teenager growing up in the forties. These wonderful tales, full of wry humour and unexpected plot twists, seem to add up to a fond portrait of an innocent era?this is, however, wartime Czechoslovakia, and the fragile world of the adolescent falls under the shadow of the Nazi presence.

A masterpiece of storytelling by the Governor General’s Award?winning author, this new edition of The Swell Season features a new foreword by the Oscar-winning stars of the film Once.

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.

Josef Skvorecky's profile page