“The pens… the pencils… the paper… look… I’ve been writing,” I said to him, taking my wet hands out of the fridge again. Water began to drip onto the mess of paper on the kitchen bench. “What are these squiggles? What on earth have you been doing?” He started to grab my little hurricanes and […]
This doesn’t have anything to do with Central and Eastern European writing but I was very happy to publish an excerpt from Argentine writer Carlos Busqued’s debut novel Under This Terrible Sun in B O D Y and so am posting it here. It’s a truly phenomenal novel – dark but not gloomy, filled with […]
Milan Kundera wasn’t the only Czech writer to leave Czechoslovakia for France in the 1970s. Living a shadowy existence in another country is the subject of Lubomír Martínek’s story “Refugee” translated by Charles Sabatos. “Because the harbor was such a favored refuge for people escaping from various regimes, a lot of former political prisoners lived […]
At Deutsche Welle there is article about the new Berlin-based publisher Frisch & Co. Run by E.J. Van Lanen the e-book publisher is putting out a fascinating selection of novels in translation from Germany, Austria, Spain, Argentina and Italy. I have just read the debut novel they put out by Argentine writer Carlos Busqued, Under […]
On March 7, 2005 the hero of Selvedin Avdić’s brilliant and captivating novel Seven Terrors decides to get up out of bed after nine months of self-imposed apathy as a result of having been left by his wife. Ready to return to life what he actually returns to is horror. Read the book review in […]
Manuscripts don’t burn, but they can sure be kept locked away a long time. In February 1961, KGB agents came to Vasily Grossman’s apartment and confiscated the typescript, manuscript and virtually everything connected to the novel Life and Fate completed the previous year. Now, 52 years later and a mere 20 or so years after […]
Greeks Go Home To Die is the latest novel published by Polish writer Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki, the book having been brought out by Znak in June 2013. An excerpt of the novel translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood appeared in B O D Y’s Sunday European Fiction and as a follow up here is a transcript […]
Greeks Go Home to Die is Polish writer Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki’s most recently published novel, having been brought out by Znak earlier in 2013. The novel’s main character is the son of a Greek communist guerilla forced to leave for the Eastern Bloc after their defeat in Greece’s civil war. The novel alternates between the boy’s […]
“Alevtina” is a short story by Dmitri Novoselov, translated by Will Firth, recounting a woman’s odyssey through different husbands, lovers and wild turns of fortune whose chaos is highly suggestive of the post-Soviet Russia during which her adult life has played out. Read more Sunday European Fiction Photo – Russian graffiti that says “Kitchen and […]
Antonia Lloyd-Jones has been awarded the 2012 Found in Translation Award, the best Polish translator award funded by the Polish Book Institute. The award, which until now was given for a single book translated from Polish, was instead awarded to Lloyd-Jones for “the entirety of her output from the previous year”. And an impressive output […]
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