Somewhere there is bound to be a librarian doing their earnest best to classify Miroslav Penkov’s brilliant debut collection of stories East of the West. At first glance it seems fairly straightforward. Penkov is Bulgarian and the book is subtitled “A country in stories” – that country being Bulgaria. Yet the book was written in […]
My review of the fourth volume of Canetti’s memoirs in the newly released issue of the Cerise Press. “I was living in England as its intellect decayed. I was a witness to the fame of a T.S. Eliot. Is it possible for people ever to repent sufficiently of that? An American brings over a Frenchman […]
Is the poet who engaged in grimace contests being fixed into the useful image of a European literary saint? The centenary of Czesław Miłosz falls on June 30 of this year amidst a more than yearlong array of festivals, readings, official declarations and celebrations stretching from the poet’s birthplace in Lithuania to Poland and the […]
Anna Andreyevna Gorenko was born on June 23, 1889. She went on to write some of the greatest poetry of the 20th century under the name of Anna Akhmatova. From “Requiem” ‘I arrive here as if I’ve come home!’ I’d like to name you all by name, but the list Has been removed and there […]
An article in Berlin literary magazine Readux about Arthur Koestler, his newly reissued Dialogue with Death and defining one of the 20th century’s most polarizing intellectual figures. Link: Koestler on Readux Photo – Arthur Koestler, Paris 1937 – by Fred Stein
Eastern European literature snuck its way into the pages of The Guardian last week when former Granta-editor Ian Jack revealed the hoax behind Albanian writer Jiri Kajane. Following publication of Kajane’s stories in American literary magazines such as Glimmer Train, the Chicago Review and the Michigan Quarterly Review in the mid 90s, Jack became interested […]
Slovak writer Pavel Vilikovský on facts, realism and what he really learned about Central Europeanism from Olomouc and Camus Pavel Vilikovský’s Ever Green Is …: Collected Prose was published by Northwestern University Press in 2002, while a short story (also included in the NWU collection) came out in Dalkey’s Slovak fiction anthology in 2010. […]
An interview with the creator of the comicbook Baroque anti-hero Xavier of the House of the Sorrowful Snows Since 1989 and the reemergence of Prague on the world stage, the city has become ever more closely linked with its Baroque artistic heritage. Write a novel that takes place in Prague and chances are the book […]
“A curious novel, Kafka’s Amerika: indeed, why should this young twenty-nine-year-old writer have laid his first novel in a continent where he had never set foot? This choice shows a clear intent: to not do realism; better yet: to not do a serious work. He did not even try to palliate his ignorance by research; […]
There must be something other than pollen in the air, because literary disputes have been both more frequent and more heated than usual: the novel isn’t dead, one earnest article claims, it just happens to be the focus of a rearguard attack by the defenders of privilege. The ongoing debate over the value or worthlessness […]
literalab 