Writers from Germany to Bulgaria take a literary boat trip down the Danube and attempt to explore issues of European identity, the chaotic state of the world and the precarious situation of freelance writers. The Danube runs almost 3,000 kilometers from the Black Forest in Germany all the way to the Black Sea, and has […]
Irish novelist John Banville was presented the 11th annual Franz Kafka Prize on Tuesday by the Franz Kafka Society, with various Czech dignitaries in attendance. The ceremony took place in Prague’s Old Town Hall, and the internationally celebrated writer, critic and author of a book on Prague spoke about how he imagined the proceedings would […]
Parallel Stories by Péter Nádas is being published in the US on October 26. The 1,152 page novel took the Hungarian writer 18 years to complete, which is one the reasons it is being “hailed” as a “once-in-a-generation literary event.” Considering the recent New York Times lament that so many top American novelists like Jeffrey […]
Twisted Spoon Press has announced the release of Ladislav Klíma’s novella Glorious Nemesis. The publisher describes the book as “a balladic ghost story that explores the metaphysics of love and death, crime and reincarnation,” set in the mountainous Tyrol. The novella was translated from the Czech by Marek Tomin. Twisted Spoon previously published Klíma’s novel […]
Translator Alex Zucker will be presenting and reading from his translation of Petra Hůlová’s debut novel All This Belongs to Me (Paměť mojí babičce) as part of the European Book Club at 7:00 p.m. on October 26, at the Czech Center in New York. While a guest at the 2011 Prague Writer’s Festival Hůlová did […]
Earlier this year Vasyl Shklyar refused the Shevchenko Prize and the $32,000 in prize money as a protest against what he considers the anti-Ukrainian policies of current Minister of Education Dmytro Tabachnyk. In an essay I linked to previously novelist Andrey Kurkov referred to Black Raven as “a rare literary scandal,” for being nominated for […]
There I was, taking a perfectly innocent stroll through the woods, passing an overturned tree stump I had seen a thousand times before when I made out a shadowy figure lingering behind it, standing there suspiciously still. He looked Russian, though it was hard to tell because it was foggy and he had such a […]
Today in Literature informs us that it was this day in 1896 that saw the premiere of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull in St. Petersburg. The opening bombed, in a large part because the audience came expecting a conventional farce rather than the type of wordy drama that Chekhov has become famous for. Although driven backstage […]
Miroslav Penkov, author of East of the West:A Country in Stories, has a post on the official blog of The Story Prize about how when he first arrived in the US, in spite of telling friends he would wait to write in English until he felt comfortable with the language, he began submitting stories written […]
It begins in Prague’s Old Town of the well-known cobblestone, labyrinthine streets, where Franz Kafka was born and raised, but in this case refers more to the city of crystal ashtrays, miniature stone Golems, Kafka tee-shirts and guided tours. As the editors of “Kafkaesque: Stories Inspired by Franz Kafka” point out in their introduction, “we […]
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