Today marks what would have been the 72nd birthday of poet Joseph Brodsky. Two months after his death in January 1996, Czeslaw Milosz wrote in Index on Censorship of what ...
Spotlight
Literary roundup: Russians in New York
BookExpo America (BEA) starts June 2 in New York, with a fantastic ...
Martin Vopěnka’s Fifth Dimension
Czech author and publisher Martin Vopěnka was a guest at the Prague ...
Franz Kafka Prize goes to Czech writer Daniela Hodrová
The Franz Kafka society announced today that this year’s Franz Kafka Prize goes to writer and literary theorist Daniela Hodrová. There were a few years where the Kafka Prize was seen as a golden globe-like preview of the Nobel Prize for literature after Elfriede Jelinek and Harold Pinter won both in successive years. My guess [...]
Literary roundup: Rossica Prize for best post-horses of enlightenment
Congratulations to John Elsworth for winning this year’s Rossica Translation Prize for his translation of Andrei Bely’s Petersburg. I don’t remember exactly how he put it but I remember Nabokov writing how untranslatable the novel is. Hopefully, this means he was wrong. The other shortlisted books all sound great – and include Vasily Grossman’s The [...]
Publishing house of ill repute
File this under: it couldn’t happen in America. It is one of the stranger publishing stories I’ve seen in a while. The trophy wife of former Czech Prime Minister Jiří Paroubek, Petra Paroubková, is publishing a Czech translation of a guide for brothel owners by someone who apparently knows what he’s talking about. The author [...]
Fess up: the Festival of the European Short Story
Sunday, May 27 sees the beginning of the 2012 Festival of the European Short Story (FESS) in Zagreb. The festival has a fantastic-looking new website which unfortunately still has some kinks to work out (clicking on a link for an interview with David Albahari I arrived at a wordless page that had a photograph of [...]
Book World Prague’s Emphasis on Black Sea Writers Pays Off
An article on Publishing Perspectives examining the success of Book World Prague in spite of the economic downturn Everybody is crying, there is a drop in sales of up to 20%. There is a big problem with piracy as well as a big problem with the copying of textbooks. Nevertheless, for the first time in [...]
Enter the Czech Literature Portal
While everyone seems vitally concerned with the portal Loki utilizes to make a surprise appearance on earth in The Avengers there is another portal I’d like to turn your attention to. If you haven’t gone to the Czech Literature Portal site yet now is your chance. From the beginning of May I have taken on [...]
Alexander Kluge in Prag
Work of Alexander Kluge, among the boldest filmmakers and writers of the past 50 years, as well as being a key figure in New German Cinema, gets Prague showing It is not uncommon to find artists who came to film from work in other mediums. Some are painters turned filmmakers, while others turned to film [...]
Czech Literature Night goes European
From the works of Havel and Mácha to the Tata Bojs and a Hungarian vampire, Europe celebrates its literature What began as a Czech project called Literature Night has now spread from Prague across the continent, with Czech and European authors appearing and having their work read from London to Yerevan. In its fourth year [...]
Literary roundup: Bulgarian brunch (with Absinthe) and well-read cities
Absinthe: New European Writing #17 – the Bulgarian issue is ready and on the way to subscribers. So subscribe, order it. Besides the work of a lot of great Bulgarian writers I have an essay in it on some recent adaptations that have made it to Bulgaria’s silver screen. I will also soon have some [...]
Writers beyond the page
Being a good or great writer is certainly no guarantee of having a great, good or even remedial grasp of politics, culture or, really, anything at all. Yet there are writers whose intellect outside their books approximates their intellect in their books, and so it can be worth hearing what they have to say. For [...]
