Charles Ota Heller

Here it is: the cover of Prague: My Long Journey Home. The book will be available shortly. I will keep everyone informed via this blog, my Facebook page, and a blast e-mail to those on my mailing list. Anyone who wishes to be added to the latter should respond via my web site:   www.charlesoheller.com

What a grand day I’m having!

I was pleased and honored to receive the following endorsement for my upcoming book, Prague: My Long Journey Home, from His Excellency Petr Gandalovic, Czech Republic’s Ambassador to the United States: “I thoroughly enjoyed reading Charles Heller’s new book, Prague: My Long Journey Home, an insightful and inspiring glimpse into the life of a man who was…

As Prague: My Long Journey Home enters the production stage, endorsements are coming in from its early readers. Here are three: “I enjoyed reading Charles Heller’s book Prague: My Long Journey Home. Having lived through the same times in occupied Czechoslovakia and later under Communists, coming to America 20 years after Dr. Heller, I understand…

As of this week, all edits and preliminary tasks are finished. Prague: My Long Journey Home is in production at Abbott Press. The cover for the soft-cover version and the dust jacket for the hard-cover book are being prepared, and the manuscript is in the process of typesetting, pagination, etc. It’s an exciting time. The…

As readers of this blog know, I’m a huge fan of Pat Conroy. I consider him the finest living American writer and am insanely jealous of his ability to paint lifelike characters and scenes, and to keep a story moving at a torrid pace. I am on a mission to read three or four of his…

A couple of weeks ago, on the last day of our vacation in Canada, Sue and I walked into a used-book shop in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The “kid-in-a-candy-store” analogy is much too weak a description of my elation at being surrounded by thousands of wonderful friends just waiting to be read. I got lucky in this…

Last week, I came to an agreement with a publisher for the English-language (original) version of my first memoir, which is titled Prague: My Long Journey Home. The publisher is Abbott Press, a division of Writer’s Digest, located in Bloomington, Indiana. We will be publishing both a hard-cover book and a trade paperback; at the same time,…

Following the successful launch of the Czech-language version of my first memoir, we are in the final stages of preparing for publication in the U.S. the English-language version. The book’s title will be: PRAGUE: MY LONG JOURNEY HOMEA Memoir of Survival, Denial and Redemption The current publication target is late October 2011, with an earlier…

Having survived World War II, 13-year-old Ota Karel Heller was told to forget everything that happened when he and his parents left for the United States in 1948. Now in his mid-70s with a successful stateside career, Charles Ota Heller — as he is now called — revisits his past with all its blemishes in…