“Shirting asked her to read her essay aloud: My teacher is some small wildebeest. He is a name John Shirting. My name is Monika. He is the baddest person in this world. I feed him the cats. He is my darling. Dear Monika. The way she pronounced her w’s as v’s, calling him a vildebeest […]
“For this was always the dream of the founding fathers, who had imagined the country as a military base from the start, and it was also the dream of those who believed in the existence of the truly nonexistent country, in their Olympic victories, in their paper cars, in their astronaut’s wave. If a country […]
With the much anticipated publication of Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding imminent the Romanian author is engaged in a North American tour, with appearances in Minnesota, Chicago, Boston, New York and Toronto. You can see the full schedule here. Translated into English by Sean Cotter the novel isn’t any easier to read than his Nostalgia but like the […]
2013 winner of the Magnesia Litera prize for his novel Rybí krev (Fish Blood), Jiří Hájíček will be appearing in London together with his English translator Gale A. Kirking. The event will take place at the Slovak Embassy on October 17. Kirking will read from his translation of Hájíček’s highly successful novel Rustic Baroque (Selský […]
Paradises might be a reimagining of Camus’ Outsider – but in female form and living in 21st-century Buenos Aires. Our narrator allows the hazards of death and chance encounters to lead her through the city, where she sleepwalks into a job in the zoo’s reptile house, and another administering morphine to one of the oddball […]
“As far as I’m aware, none of the big shots in the Third Reich was a sadist. All four committed suicide. Hitler and Goebbels did so even before Germany capitulated. Himmler followed when he realized his captors weren’t going to treat him as an important statesman but rather as a criminal, while the hedonist Goering […]
A lot of the publishers of translated fiction have been weighing in recently on the state of affairs. Now publisher Stefan Tobler takes the occasion of his And Other Stories third anniversary to add his own assessment of the challenges of bringing out legitimately interesting, unique books in the English-speaking world, with its closed-minded philistinism […]
I remember the first time I saw a Romanian movie as a teenager, it was from the Ceaușescu era of course, just as I was from the Reagan one. In fact, my entire teenage years were confined within the great communicator’s two terms in office. Not that I’d compare myself to a victim of a […]
“A hand migrated to the abdomen; the other was on its way to the other iceberg. But the encounter with the left breast was even worse. The coldness, the skin wrinkled over the flesh, made him shiver. And time stopped still again, as if the coldness of the body he was groping had overflowed into […]
Last month B O D Y published an excerpt from Argentine writer Carlos Busqued’s debut novel Under This Terrible Sun, just recently published in Megan McDowell’s English translation. Now, I have written a review of the book for this week’s Friday Pick. Read the review, read the excerpt, read the novel – not necessarily in […]
literalab 