The Dalkey Archive Press has just published the Review of Contemporary Fiction: The Future of British Fiction. This is the Fall 2012 issue but don’t worry, it doesn’t mean that we now have months and months of cold weather in front of us (at least I hope it doesn’t). As usual, if you want to […]
At Hungarian Literature Online there is an interview with Matt Henderson Ellis, whose novel Keeping Bedlam at Bay in the Prague Café was recently published by New Europe Books. The interview is titled “Prague kind of lends itself to neurosis,” which has instantly become my automated answer to the perpetual “Why did you move to […]
The 4th Slovo Russian Literature Festival is well underway in London. Running from March 5 to 26 the festival celebrates Russian literature old and new, along with the links between the two. This is well illustrated by lectures being given on March 15 by contemporary novelist Dmitry Bykov (Living Souls, 2011) on Boris Pasternak and […]
The two novellas and five short stories that make up The Bridge Over the Neroch: And Other Works comprise the rest of the writing left to us by the author of Summer in Baden-Baden, Leonid Tsypkin. New Directions is bringing the book out in February 2013 and you can read my review in the 2nd […]
The Millions has put out a long and translation-heavy list of books to be published in 2013 in the US. There are quite a few Central and Eastern European novels to look forward to, including a few I have already read, either because they came out in the UK last year or because I took […]
Looking at the list of my top 10 books from 2012, plus an added three from 2011 and two from even earlier, I can’t help noticing that besides the geographical commonality (they’re all by writers from Central and Eastern Europe except the Chilean Carlos Cerda, though even he was writing about being in exile in […]
New crime writing from the former Eastern Bloc – a list. Words Without Borders has just come out with its (Non-Scandinavian) Crime issue for December. It’s an excellent and varied selection though there is only one short piece from Eastern Europe in an extract from Sergey Kuznetsov’s Butterfly Skin translated by Andrew Bromfield. With that […]
There are many different ways writers can infuse a story or novel with intensity without much in the way of incident or plot. The movement can occur on symbolic or historical levels, they can mine literary history as their character walks around Dublin or devote all their attention to the beauty of the individual sentences […]
It’s a novel about the early days of the Russian Revolution, the civil war and the famine that ravaged the Soviet Union. The extremes of hunger and poverty are set off against the high living and obscene wealth of those taking advantage of the Soviet government’s New Economic Policy. A story of love and betrayal […]
As I made my way through Frankfurt Airport on the way back to Prague from the book fair a strange incident took place, something that reflects a new and interesting trend in writing from Central and Eastern Europe – certainly in terms of the books getting translated into English – but which almost got me […]
