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Jan Novak

Born: 1953 in Czechoslovakia
Pen Name: None

Connection to Illinois: The author immigrated to Chicago as a teenager in 1969 with his parents. He lived in Cicero and attended Morton East High School and the University of Chicago.

Biography: Novak is a Chicago-based American novelist. He was born in Czechoslovakia in 1953 and spent his first 16 years there. Currently, he is a colleague of Vaclav Havel.


Awards:

Primary Literary Genre(s): Fiction

Jan Novak on WorldCat : http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=jan+novak


Selected Titles

Commies, crooks, gypsies, spooks & poets :
ISBN: 1883642094 OCLC: 31865697

Steerforth Press, S. Royalton, Vt. : ©1995.

Journeying from Chicago for a year's stay in his Czech homeland, the author and his wife and two children live high and low amidst Prague's ancient glory and modern confusion, and Novak moves through Eastern Europe with a native's ease and a westerner's eye. His vivid accounts of daily life in the Czech Republic and of the tragic war unfolding next door in the former Yugoslavia are at once highly personal, raucous, comic, painful, and memorable. Novak ties his book together with personal accounts of fighting for oranges as a child in the Stalinist fifties, of getting beaten up by state security officers as a teenager in the sixties, of being expelled from his homeland "forever" in the seventies, and finally of passing on a sense of ethnic heritage to his American children.

  Striptease Chicago
ISBN: 8020401318 OCLC: 27318712

Mladá fronta, Praha : 1992.

  Striptease Chicago /
ISBN: 0887811299 OCLC: 9536175

Sixty-Eight Publishers, Toronto, Ont. : 1983.

The grand life :
ISBN: 0671643541 OCLC: 16090035

Poseidon Press, New York : ©1987.

The Willys dream kit /
ISBN: 0151967660 OCLC: 11496836

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, San Diego : ©1985.

 

 

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