Witches Sabbath By Maurice Sachs Translated from the French by Richard Howard 2020, Spurl Editions, 276 pp. Maurice Sachs was born in Paris in 1906, when the Belle Époque was ...
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Literary roundup: Balabán, Barnás and books
For their series “The Czech Books You Must Read”, Czech Radio has ...
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Ludovic Bruckstein stories
For the occassion of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Istros Books is publishing Ludovic Bruckstein’s collection With an Unopened Umbrella in the Pouring Rain, translated from the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth. Bookanista has an excerpt from the novel here as well as a review of a pair of novellas published by Istros as The Trap. There […]
Nezval in B O D Y
I greet your gliding flight O wings of deathThose who resisted itHave purple facesHave bloodshot eyes like a withering grape leaf – from the latest offering in the Winter 2021 Issue of B O D Y is a poem titled “The Trapdoor”, excerpted from the 1936 work of poet Vítězslav Nezval, Woman in the Plural, […]
Death of the Artists: Marinetti’s Last Stand
Marinetti was both the Malcolm McLaren and Johnny Rotten of his era, the impresario and figurehead of what was early 20th century punk. He charmed his audience with shock and provocation, telling his Russian hosts that the Kremlin was an absurdity, Tolstoy hypocritical, Dostoevsky hysterical, responded to a question about Russian art by asking if […]
Magnetized | Review | Winter Issue
In 1982, Ricardo Luis Melogno murdered four taxi drivers in the space of a week in Buenos Aires. He has been locked up in prison or psychiatric institutions ever since, and now is cast in a legal limbo from which he may never be released. Argentine writer Carlos Busqued, whose debut novel Under This Terrible […]
Rankov in B O D Y: Winter Issue
After they finished the rosary, their mother made her usual plea: “Dear God, please bring Karcsi home safely from the war.” “Amen,” Péter and his father said. “No,” Karcsi said, “I don’t want to come home. Instead you should pray that I live a less depraved life in hell than I have in this world.” […]
Pavol Rankov wins 14th Prix du livre européen
The fourteenth Prix du livre européen has been awarded to Slovak writer Pavol Rankov for his novel It Happened on the First of September with a prize of €10,000 to be presented in a ceremony in February 2021. The novel was published in a French translation in 2019, while its English translation by Magdalena Mullek […]
Pavol Rankov review in Versopolis
“The way Rankov balances and weaves together the seemingly lighter side of the September 1st story with its darker and more momentous occasions, such as the September 1st, 1939 outbreak of World War II, makes for a highly compelling narrative. By slipping back and forth from fascism to youthful frivolity, the darkness is made darker […]
Milan Kundera wins Kafka Prize
The Franz Kafka Society has announced that the winner of this year’s award is Milan Kundera. The 91 year-old writer responded to the announcement from Paris by phone, saying he was particularly honored to receive the Kafka Prize. The Kafka Prize has a long list of prestigious previous winners, including a brief run where it […]
Julia Lukshina in B O D Y
“As evening drew on, I tore myself away from my desk, went out into the field, and wandered this way and that, this way and that, until at some point I found myself dancing. At first it was awful: I kept stopping and looking around. But then awareness yielded to motion. I was scooping up […]
Kundera library returning to Brno
Milan Kundera, together with his wife Věra, have donated the author’s library and archive to the Moravian Library in Brno, Czech Republic. The library has announced that the transfer of books and other materials from the Kundera’s Paris apartment will take place later this fall. Besides numerous international editions of the author’s books, his articles […]
