Charles Ota Heller

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…

For my Czech-speaking readers: you may be interested in a two-part interview which appeared on the website TOPZINE. Here are the links: http://www.topzine.cz/charles-o-heller-svuj-vystrel-na-nemeckeho-vojaka-si-pamatuji-jako-by-se-to-stalo-vcera http://www.topzine.cz/charles-o-heller-za-komunismu-me-sebrala-stb I would be interested in your comments.

Several friends who have followed my blogs about my “magical book tour” have asked why I haven’t shown the photo on the cover of my book. Thank you all for the heads-up. Here is the beautiful, melancholy image of a family on the bank of the river Vltava by Czech photographer Pavel Kolin.

In order to save shipping costs for Czech-speaking North Americans who wish to purchase Dlouha cesta domu, we have made arrangements with a Canadian book-selling web site from which the book can be ordered. Please go on                                               http://www.czech-books.com/ and request Dlouha cesta domu by Charles Ota Heller. Thank you.

On the way to the Prague airport at five in the morning, I asked our friend Vlada to turn on the radio in order to catch the weather forecast. The first announcement we heard was: “Osama bin Laden is dead!” After a brief celebration, I experienced a selfish reaction. “Why couldn’t they have waited a day?”…