Jan Novák (writer)

Novák's first published story was the winning entry in a short-story contest by the University of Chicago Maroon, which he originally wrote in Czech and then translated into English.

His 1985 novel The Willys Dream Kit, (ISBN 0151967660 ) draws on family experience and depicts his father's life story from his youth during the Nazi occupation to death in the USA.

His second novel The Grand Life (Poseidon Press, 1987), again partly inspired by his own experiences (the hero is a middle manager at a Chicago telephone company), was also favorably received, but not a commercial success.

It's his "adventure in the border zone of genres", recounting a year he spent in Prague in 1992–3, where he moved to teach his grade-school children Czech.

[3] Novák's So Far So Good, an extensive literary treatment of the story of the Mašín brothers who escaped to West Berlin in 1953, was originally written in English but was first published translated into Czech as "Zatím dobrý".

In 2022, Novak published "Underpaid, but Armed", an autobiographical report on his three year stint as an armored carrier in Chicago at the beginning of the century (ISBN 978-80-257-3897-9).

He co-wrote the screenplay for "Nejasná zpráva o konci světa" An ambiguous report about the end of the world, directed by Juraj Jakubisko.

Novak is the screenwriter of "Nedodržaný sľub" ("Broken Promise"), based on a true story of a Jewish boy who survived the Holocaust by playing soccer brilliantly, which was nominated for the foreign Oscar by Slovakia in 2009.

Novak and his son also shot a documentary comedy, entitled "Pušky, puky, pivo a psi", ("Guns, Pucks, Beer and Dogs"), recounting the follies of the best ice hockey players drafted into the Czechoslovak army.

[1] Novák's first play was "Bohemian Heaven," which opened at the Provincetown Playhouse in 1980; it paints a satirical portrait of a newly arrived Czech immigrant family in Cicero, Illinois.

In 2018, they produced a comic-book version of "Zatím dobrý" ("So Far, So Good") and in 2020 "Čáslavská", a comic book biography of the winner of seven Olympic gold medals in gymnastics who ended up a cleaning lady under the neo-Stalinist regime in the Czechoslovakia of 1970's.