2015 Nobel Prize for literature winner Svetlana Alexievich gave her speech (available in a translation by Jamey Gambrell) a couple days ago in Stockholm and like her books it was a mix of her present reflections, witness testimonies as well as her diary entries stretching from 1980 to 1997. Her conclusions aren’t very cheerful, but I suppose if you’ve watched the news anytime over the last few years this won’t come as a huge surprise.
Russian Literature Week 2015
Russian Literature Week is in full swing in New York with a great program of events. Today, Tue. Dec 8 there will be a panel on “The Real Story of Doctor Zhivago” with Peter Finn, author of The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book and translator Marian Schwartz.
Check out the whole week’s program here
Zagreb Noir
At Lithub you can read Ivan Sršen’s introduction to Akashic Books’ Zagreb Noir collection, containing work by Robert Perišić, Josip Novakovich and a number of other Croatian writers. Sršen writes:
“The authors of Zagreb Noir peer deep under the skin of this old city on the banks of the Sava River, some of them checking it out from above, at a safe distance yet with the precision of a surveyor. Some of them look it right in the eye, facing off in round after round of an exhausting boxing match. All of them have succeeded in creating a convincing and amazing gallery of characters, people we avoid because they move through the city at night, stick to the side streets, congregate in garages, cheap bars, hospitals, and are up to their elbows in suspicious activity.”
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