As a writer, Skvorecky was a huge figure in Czech literature, but he was also well known for establishing ’68 Publishers in Toronto, where he made available more than 200 works from Czech exiles and authors whose works were banned by the communists.

Here’s a link to his

Incredibly, he returned to Prague after the 1968 uprising was put down:

Klima began to fight back against these privations straightaway. “I organised a reading the week after we got back,” he says. “I invited about 45 guests, which I’d worked out was the most I could get into our living room. And I prepared meatballs, ‘Klima-balls’ as they came to be known. There was some wine, and somebody read something that was newly written. That was how it went on, every week. I remember Havel read two of his new plays; Kundera, who was still in Prague at that point, came and read some things.”

After about a year, Klima’s friend Ludvik Vaculik (the author of A Cup of Coffee with my Interrogator) brought along a man from Ostrava to one of the gatherings, a writer who had spent a year in prison. The man, who later committed suicide, had signed an agreement in prison to work with the secret police and he passed on the names of everyone who was there, and pictures were taken of people coming in and out. “So from that point,” Klima says, “we were known.”

Klima, Vaculik (we’re doing a reprint edition of his The Guinea Pigs next year), Havel, and Kundera all in one place, reading together. No doubt Skvorecky attended these readings too. That’s just too much.

Vaculik has also written a sort of memoir of that time, and of the years when they published each other’s work in samidzat editions, which is really fascinating. Just reading about all of these amazing writers working together in such close proximity is something.

Maybe we’ll publish that one too…