Archive | 2014

Watch Anthony Madrid Read Live With Christopher Crawford: Tonight

Tonight at 8 PM GMT / 9 PM CET / 3 PM EST / Noon PST, Christopher Crawford and Anthony Madrid will read and answer your questions during a live-streamed online reading at Transatlantic Poetry.   Transatlantic Poetry Readings allow poets and audiences worldwide to come together in one virtual location. B O D Y […]

Continue Reading

New and Novel

The story of the beautiful and tragic Dagny Juel, inspiration to Munch and Strindberg among others; Polish science-fiction, an autobiography of a physician and party girl in Weimar Berlin, Charlotte Wolff, and an English-language debut novel from Georgia are among the new books being featured this week. Nest of Worlds by Marek S. Huberath Nest […]

Continue Reading

Literary roundup: Eastern promise and Balla

Natasha Perova, editor of Glas New Russian Writing, has a very interesting piece in PEN America on the Russian literary scene in which she discusses the young generation of writers (some of which Glas publishes due to their association with the Debut Prize) and what differentiates them from the writers of the Russian and Soviet […]

Continue Reading

Robert Perisic in B O D Y

“Have I told you the story about the guy who butchered hogs?” “Which guy?” “The one who was in the Foreign Legion. Have I told you that one?” “Is it for real?” And so starts the very short story, “One Big Mess” by Croatian writer and author of Our Man in Iraq Robert Perišić in […]

Continue Reading

Kurkov on the fate of Ukraine

Literalab favorite and author of the Death and the Penguin Andrey Kurkov has written a compelling piece about the protests and government crackdown in Ukraine for English PEN. The opening paragraph, with its account of the murder of two protesters and the abduction from a hospital of two opposition activists, one of whom was then […]

Continue Reading

Literary roundup: Death by data, and plain old death (carried out by Polish criminals)

Author of Kafka: the Decisive Years, Reiner Stach, has a great though not exactly heartwarming article in the New Statesman on how The Trial seems to relate to many of today’s wonderful extrajudicial tendencies that are coming from the freedom-loving world and that are keeping us so wonderfully safe and secure: “Death by data: how […]

Continue Reading

Vladislav Bajac in B O D Y

“About Death itself he knew everything: it would be difficult to find someone who could outdo him in his knowledge of its causes and effects, its kinds and types. Perhaps he would not excel at questions of its usefulness: not one of his teachers or rulers had instructed him about such secrets because the question […]

Continue Reading

Asymptote January 2014

Asymptote’s third anniversary issue is out and, as always, is full of great fiction, poetry, and more than I can list here. Among the highlights are Michael Hofmann’s brilliant essay on Wolfgang Koeppen, a writer who is a thousand times better than most of the names presented as the greats of the second half of […]

Continue Reading

Literalab’s Best Books of 2013

1. The Devil’s Workshop by Jáchym Topol (translated by Alex Zucker)             Like my favorite book of the year before, my favorite book of 2013 delves into the ultimate horrors that man inflicts on his fellow man, but does so with a surplus of imagination, suspense and humor. Whereas Selvedin […]

Continue Reading