Abstract
In the more ‘liberal’ sixties, Josef Škvorecký; became one of Czechoslovakia's top novelists and short story writers, having made his name with his first novel, The Cowards, which was banned shortly after publication in 1956. Now a leading emigrè publisher in Canada, he reflects here on the quality of some of the officially sanctioned prose that gets published in Prague while the works of Milan Kundera, Vàclav Havel, Ludvìk Vaculìk, Škvorecký; himself, and indeed most of the country's finest authors, are banned.