There must be something in the air. The Center for the Art of Translation’s Two Lines just came out with its annual anthology, titled “Counterfeits,” including a special section edited by Luc Sante focusing on noir literature. Then, Words Without Borders’ September 2011 issue came out with an issue devoted to an elevated form of […]
A festival devoted to Warsaw’s pre-war Yiddish culture is taking place now in the Polish capital. The 8th annual Singer’s Warsaw festival of Jewish Culture (Warszawa Singera) runs from August 27 to September 4 and includes literature, music, theater, art, lectures and an assortment of participants aiming to evoke the atmosphere of Warsaw’s massive pre-war […]
In Reading literary nihilists in Tehran I speculated that having an officially-sanctioned, award-winning, condemnatory literary critical book on absurdist, nihilist fiction might find its largest audience among the country’s future nihilists. Seeing some of the surprising titles that are being translated in Iran these days makes it look like these 21st century apostles of nothingness […]
An old relic of the Tsarist regime – Alexandra Sergeyevna Pumpianskaya – disappears from a Moscow communal apartment in what turn out to be the dying days of the Soviet Union, while her neighbors scheme over who gets the newly available square meters. A detective appears on the scene, as does an acquisitive, chess-playing locksmith […]
When Russian novels make it to the big screen it is usually because they either already have enough melodrama to turn them into marketable films (Doctor Zhivago) or because screenwriting assassins can be found to cut out the wordy parts and stick to the scenes of carriage rides, furtive kisses and duels. Recently though, a […]
One might be tempted to think that literature commonly characterized as absurdist or nihilist would not get much official attention in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Still less would anyone think that it could serve as a springboard to reaching the rarefied heights of literary prizes. Yet, as absurd and potentially nihilistic as it sounds, […]
In a bid to obtain the status of a “UNESCO Creative City of Literature,” Prague’s Municipal Library has put a literary map of the city online that locates both Czech and international writers in various parts of the city. At the moment the map is only in Czech (which I would think might hinder their […]
Polish quarterly magazine Res Publica Nowa has published a special English-language issue “Central Europe as City.” Besides the editorials, there are five articles from the issue available online on the Eurozine website and they contain some fascinating information. Articles cover an array of topics – from the multicultural history of today’s Bratislava to the Jews […]
Publishing collective Calypso Editions has followed up its new translation of Tolstoy’s How Much Land Does a Man Need and its collection of Polish poet Anna Swir’s poems about the Warsaw Uprising, Building the Barricade and Other Poems, with an anthology of Romanian poetry titled Of Gentle Wolves. Translated by Martin Woodside the slim book […]
On August 12, 1952 Yiddish literary culture received a fatal blow when novelist Dovid Bergelson and poet Peretz Markish were among 13 Soviet Jews murdered in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison. The execution became known as the Night of the Murdered Poets, with three other poets also shot that night. The outcome of Stalin’s paranoid antisemitism was […]
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