“Since preadolescence, Kusama has sourced inspiration from her waking nightmares. She suffers from rijinshou 離人症, which could be literally translated as “separate person symptom” (the first kanji is used in ...
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Under Pressure (Bosnian version)
Istros Books has a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to translate and ...
Writing the Balkans’ Holocaust
On Thursday Sept. 27 at Waterstones Nottingham, publisher and translator Susan Curtis ...
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Daniel Majling in B O D Y
“I would have forgotten this story if, about a year later, I hadn’t read a newspaper report about a lorry apprehended by the customs police in Vyšné Nemecké, at the border crossing between Slovakia and Ukraine. It is a place where customs officers frequently come across lorries that carry cheap, Chinese-made copies of branded clothes […]
Dasa Drndic in B O D Y
The world lost a major writer when Daša Drndić passed away earlier this year. The author of Trieste, Belladonna and Leica Format, all available in English translation, is still seeing her work coming out in English with the soon-to-be-published Doppelgänger coming out from Istros Books in a translation by Celia Hawkesworth and Susan Curtis. Read […]
Agnesa Kalinova in B O D Y
Fifty years ago, Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia, crushing the liberalization of the Prague Spring. What people today know about the consequences of this usually comes from images on the streets of Prague and from the lives of internationally-known Czech intellectuals like Václav Havel and Milan Kundera. This second excerpt from journalist and translator Agneša […]
Pavel Vilikovsky in B O D Y
For the second time an excerpt a novel of one of the pre-eminent Slovak writers, Pavel Vilikovský, has appeared in B O D Y’s Saturday European Fiction, with this excerpt from Fleeting Snow, published by Istros Books in a translation by Julia and Peter Sherwood. This will be the first work published by Vilikovský in […]
J.R. Pick book launch events
With Prague Book World coming up a series of events are being held in conjunction with the English-language publication of J.R. Pick’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, a tragicomic novel of a thirteen-year-old Czech boy sent to the Terezín ghetto. On Thursday, May 10th at 6:30 pm, Karolinum Press and The Bubny […]
Éva Péterfy-Novák in B O D Y
Part of Éva Péterfy-Novák’s story of love, deception and betrayal, “Moscow”, was featured in B O D Y’s Hungarian Fiction Week recently and now you can read the second part – “Moscow II” – meaning, lots more deception and betrayal without the love. If you haven’t read the first part, then do that before you […]
Q&A with Pavol Rankov
Slovak writer Pavol Rankov’s most recent novel Miesta, čo nie sú na mape (Places That Are Not on the Map) was published at the end of 2017. An excerpt from the novel appeared in the latest Saturday European Fiction in B O D Y in a translation by Magdalena Mullek and now writer and translator […]
Pavol Rankov in B O D Y
“So what happened to Uncle Ivan and Aunt Eva?” “I didn’t find out about that until later, from my parents. The house had burned to the ground that night. Their burnt bodies were found in the ashes.” “And had they been,” I hesitated before saying the word, “murdered?” – from Places That Are Not on […]
Alex Cigale on Mariengof
Translator Alex Cigale has spent years working on bringing the “lyrical excesses” of Anatoly Mariengof’s Russian prose from his 1928 novella Cynics into English. In the latest Saturday European Fiction in B O D Y he offered up a sample of some of Mariengof’s shorter prose in “Aphorisms, Anecdotes, And Other Literary Trifles” and now […]
Anatoly Mariengof in B O D Y
“Of all things, I am most likely an epicurean. ‘Death has no bearing on us,’ Epicurus had said, “For when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we no longer exist.” And that is, roughly speaking, also my attitude toward ‘non-existence’ (to use the euphemistic philosophical term). But, when […]
