On Hungarian Literature Online a review of György Spiró’s yet to be translated Spring Exhibition, a novel whose main character misses out on the 1956 uprising due to a hemorrhoid operation. There is also an interview with the author where he talks about the difficulty of dealing with anachronistic communist lingo and his memories of […]
Calypso Editions is a new artist-run, cooperative press that showed its uniqueness right from the start, launching with a new translation of Tolstoy’s classic yet lesser known novella How Much Land Does a Man Need in December 2010. The next release was a bilingual Polish-English collection by the Polish poet Anna Swir (Świrszczyńska) called Building […]
On March 24, 2011 Czech-born French writer Milan Kundera will become just the twelfth writer to have his collected works published in the prestigious Bibliothèque de La Pléiade edition during his lifetime. Published by Gallimard, the initial volume will include Kundera’s novels originally written in Czech, which form the bulk of his work. Having left […]
The latest issue of Drunken Boat is out, including my short story “Literary Theft” – a story about, among other things – a literary theft, St. Petersburg and a nefarious urban legend. “Literary theft!” Ivan cried, suddenly going into some kind of rapture. “You stole that from my poem!”—Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov Read the story […]
Franz Kafka never had the fortune, whether good or bad, of being just a writer. During his lifetime he hardly published anything and had a firm principle against making his living with his pen. After his death it became even worse. He went from being a one-man Jewish oracle to a 20th Century prophet of […]
Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk has written a compelling article about the interlinked history of the Polish and Jewish people at the Central European Forum’s Salon site. It comes in response to the controversy arising out of the upcoming publication of the book Golden Harvest (Złote żniwa) by Jan Tomasz Gross and Irena-Grudzińska Gross, which was […]
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