“It doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing as Italy,” he categorically declared as he made his rounds. He’d dramatically smack his trowel against the clay, keeping rhythm with his own argument. “The whole thing was invented by international swindlers!” “What do you mean?” the educated folks would ask in surprise. “Italy’s right there on the […]
From November 14 through 17 the Slovak capital of Bratislava will host Bibliotéka, the country’s book fair, featuring an array of Slovak and international writers and publishers such as Michal Hvorecký, Péter Esterházy and Pavel Vilikovský. But the name which has the whole city waiting with bated breath – no, the whole country – is […]
It’s Dostoevsky’s birthday today! Were he still alive, he would be eight years short of 200. It’s just as well that he isn’t though because like Solzhenitsyn in his cranky old age he would likely have a cable TV show that no one watches in which he ranted and raved against everything and everyone, except […]
“On Thursday, as always, I was awakened by the radio. Listening to the news while brushing my teeth— I have a radio right in my bathroom— I heard about the flood in the state of Pueblo, Mexico in which two thousand people had drowned. Now, I don’t know if that was the first time this […]
From Nov. 14 through Nov. 16 the 10th annual New Literature from Europe festival will take place in New York featuring a number of authors from Central (but not only) Europe. Top of the list is Czech writer of the recently published The Devil’s Workshop, Jáchym Topol (top of the list, in this case, means […]
“All courses start in the fall, when a man has to start something, turn things around, survive. It’s always great in the beginning, but there’s a point with people like him, people who never make a second payment for their German, karate, creative writing, yoga…” From a short prose piece – “All Courses Start In […]
It’s all Czech poet Pavel Šrut all week in B O D Y, beginning with Monday’s essay by translator Deborah Garfinkle “Remembering Pavel Šrut’s Worm-Eaten Light” and continuing with her translations of his poetry and a review of his work. Worm-Eaten Light is the work Šrut published in 1969 following the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia […]
“He had always had vague, artistic visions, that is to say, he was a daydreamer. Because of this, at the age of fifty he had no house of his own, no wife (she had divorced him and he couldn’t say that he didn’t understand why), no steady work.” Do you remember that feeling when you […]
“This was a symphony inside the sea, yes, inside the sea, for only now did I realize that we had, in fact, come to the seaside, complete with waves and the wind, that everything around was music and that somewhere in the distance a man was swimming, swimming in the waves and in the music, […]
It is more than ironic that an author who for years has been speaking out about the dangers of surveillance and the secret state within the state should be denied entry in the “land of the free and home of the brave.” This is from an essay by Bulgarian-German writer Ilija Trojanov titled “Revenge for […]
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