“So what happened to Uncle Ivan and Aunt Eva?” “I didn’t find out about that until later, from my parents. The house had burned to the ground that night. Their burnt bodies were found in the ashes.” “And had they been,” I hesitated before saying the word, “murdered?” – from Places That Are Not on […]
Translator Alex Cigale has spent years working on bringing the “lyrical excesses” of Anatoly Mariengof’s Russian prose from his 1928 novella Cynics into English. In the latest Saturday European Fiction in B O D Y he offered up a sample of some of Mariengof’s shorter prose in “Aphorisms, Anecdotes, And Other Literary Trifles” and now […]
“Of all things, I am most likely an epicurean. ‘Death has no bearing on us,’ Epicurus had said, “For when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we no longer exist.” And that is, roughly speaking, also my attitude toward ‘non-existence’ (to use the euphemistic philosophical term). But, when […]
Culture.pl offers a listing of new Polish books being published in 2018, including novels from writers such as Olga Tokarczuk, Dorota Masłowska and Jerzy Pilch as well as a two-volume biography of the great Zbigniew Herbert among many others offerings. Tokarczuk has a few books translated into English, most recently the novel Flights, translated by […]
All this week B O D Y is featuring newly translated Hungarian fiction, starting with Sándor Jászberényi’s story, “Banana Split“, of a lurid, drunken, drugged night in Cairo that veers into the borders between the hallucinatory and magical realism. Then there’s the excerpt from Vilmos Csányi’s novel The Scent of Perfection, in which a young […]
Beauty in Hell: Culture in the Gulag is an online exhibition at The Hunterian at the University of Glasgow on one of the Soviet Union’s earliest prison camps, Solovki. Recently, B O D Y published a poem by a former Solovki inmate Yury Kazarnovsky, “Tram“, and an example of some of the amazing cultural and […]
“The writer bought a literary magazine, leafed through it, and was gratified: he hadn’t submitted anything and none of his work had been published. A few weeks later the annual nominations for the national literary prize were announced: to his relief, he wasn’t nominated…” So begins Balla’s short story “Paper Planes“, translated from the Slovak […]
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