“You leave Fitting Room no. 5 and drift tiredly down the dark corridor, and in your reflection you watch the shining of your shimmery scales beneath the dim gleam of the neon lights. A hazy sign high on the walls at the side leads you on toward the luxurious center. You travel like an illuminated […]
The biggest Czech literary awards were given out last night and the Book of the Year went to Radka Denemarková for Hodiny z olova. Best Prose went to the prolific and inimitable Pavla Horáková for Teorie podivnosti (A Theory of Strangeness) while Discovery of the Year went to Probudím se na Šibuji (I Wake Up […]
“Since preadolescence, Kusama has sourced inspiration from her waking nightmares. She suffers from rijinshou 離人症, which could be literally translated as “separate person symptom” (the first kanji is used in the Japanese words for “to separate” and “divorce”). In English it is usually rendered as depersonalization. Even the hallucinations it spurs in her are picturesque, […]
The call for the 12th annual edition of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation’s Sozopol Fiction Seminars is approaching, with five English-language and five Bulgarian-language fellows to be accepted from applicants that send their materials in by February 25. It’s an incredible program in an incredible place, with everything paid except 50% of travel expenses. This year’s […]
Written in 1980, Dogs and Others, by Serbian writer Biljana Jovanović and translated into English by John K. Cox, shows life in 1960’s socialist Belgrade through a very particular yet representative family. Madness, suicide and the first openly lesbian character in the country’s literature are just part of the bohemian milieu and experimental writing. Read […]
Istros Books has a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to translate and publish Under Pressure, a short story collection by war veteran and writer, Faruk Šehić. Šehić’s debut novel, Quiet Flows the Una, published in Will Firth’s English translation by Istros, won the 2013 EU Prize for Literature. The book was first published in Bosnian […]
“I would have forgotten this story if, about a year later, I hadn’t read a newspaper report about a lorry apprehended by the customs police in Vyšné Nemecké, at the border crossing between Slovakia and Ukraine. It is a place where customs officers frequently come across lorries that carry cheap, Chinese-made copies of branded clothes […]
The world lost a major writer when Daša Drndić passed away earlier this year. The author of Trieste, Belladonna and Leica Format, all available in English translation, is still seeing her work coming out in English with the soon-to-be-published Doppelgänger coming out from Istros Books in a translation by Celia Hawkesworth and Susan Curtis. Read […]
On Thursday Sept. 27 at Waterstones Nottingham, publisher and translator Susan Curtis of Istros Books will be in conversation with translator Christina Pribićević-Zorić in a discussion titled “The End of the World? How the Balkans writes the Holocaust”. The occasion is the upcoming publication of the novel Doppelgänger by Daša Drndić in mid-October, translated into […]
Fifty years ago, Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia, crushing the liberalization of the Prague Spring. What people today know about the consequences of this usually comes from images on the streets of Prague and from the lives of internationally-known Czech intellectuals like Václav Havel and Milan Kundera. This second excerpt from journalist and translator Agneša […]
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