Part I – On Best European Fiction 2011 and the Euro-American debate over literary adventurousness The publication of the inaugural Best European Fiction collection by Dalkey Archive Press in 2010 resulted in a bit of American literary defensiveness over claims that European fiction was more adventurous and experimental than its new world counterpart. Zadie Smith’s […]
In the last years of his long life Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato was apparently kept from reading and writing by his doctors and instead devoted himself to painting. Sabato’s literary ties to Central European and Russian fiction are evident enough in his books, but in case you needed further proof …
1954 XI. Tuesday With Ernesto Sabato (an Argentine writer) in the bar Helvetico. Besides writing, Sabato teaches philosophy privately and initiates me into his method. He says Hay que golpear (one must strike). One must tear them away from the reality to which they have become accustomed and cause them to see everything anew. Their […]
Aleksandar Ristovic (1933-1994) is a Serbian poet whose sole book in English, Devil’s Lunch, was translated by Serbian-American poet Charles Simic and published in 1999. At Harriet, the blog of the Poetry Foundation poet Jeffrey McDaniel provides a mouth watering introduction to Ristovic’s work by taking readers through the title poem “Devil’s Lunch.” For more […]
Eastern disillusionment meets western incomprehension On Dorota Masłowska’s play – “A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians” It is hard to be subversive in the 21st century. Writers and artists of all kinds have been aiming in that particular direction for so long now that it seems almost old-fashioned. And if you’re from what is commonly […]
Czech novelist Petra Hůlová (b. 1979) vaulted to fame almost a decade ago with the publication of her debut novel All of This Belongs to Me (Paměť mojí babičce, 2002). Since then she has written five more novels in Czech and in 2009 saw her much acclaimed first novel published by Northwestern University Press in […]
I like writers’ festivals – not when the writers read their work, which is usually boring, or when the discussions are overly organized, in which case they can be dull too. The most interesting aspects of writers’ festivals are the moments that typically slip through the cracks, that you have to see in person to […]
A response to Tao Lin’s article in the New York Observer. Every so often the “Novel” is brought out on the stage of a newspaper, magazine or manifesto like a patient aboutto go under the knife in an operating theater. “Does the Novel Have a Future?” reads the headline of Taiwanese-American writer Tao Lin’s latest […]
For many authors the acronym MFA refers to the Master of Fine Arts programs in writing that are currently so popular in the US, and that some critics argue create a stifling uniformity among aspiring scribes. For Tomáš Kafka, MFA instead refers to his employer, the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As the current Czech […]
The 20th century is often justifiably referred to as a bloodbath. The 21st century is bloody too, but might more accurately be described as a bubble bath. It was ushered in following the bursting of the dot-com bubble, and since then has experienced a housing bubble, a commodities bubble and almost every kind of financial, […]
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