Milan Kundera’s first novel in 13 years, The Festival of Insignificance, will be published in Linda Asher’s English translation next month and the New Yorker has just published an excerpt, though it’s being promoted as a short story, “The Apologizer”.
The novel was published in Italy in 2013 and then in France and Spain.
Bulgarian fiction
The newest issue of Words Without Borders is out, devoted to New Palestinian Writing. Their subsection for the month is a feature on Bulgarian fiction, with work by Georgi Tenev and Olya Stoyanova, both of whom I read and met in Bulgaria at the Sozopol Fiction Seminars last year, their work translated by Angela Rodel. It also features writing by Vlado Trifonov, translated by Peter Skipp and Agop Melkonyan, translated by Kalin M. Nenov.
In addition to all the great fiction, non-fiction and poetry and interviews there are book reviews of Magda Szabó’s The Door and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, the latter of which is easily one of the best books I’ve read this year.
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