“The moon has gone down, disappeared somewhere; the stars are now a pale yellow colour and fast fading, all the merriment having gone from them. Dew is falling as Ester carries the milk pail, says czokolom, thank you, in their language and tries to squeeze past the old woman on her way out. But the […]
On June 18 New York’s Czech Center will be hosting the release of Heda Margolius Kovály’s novel, Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street. Heda Margolius Kovály (1919-2010) is most famous for her memoir Under A Cruel Star – A Life in Prague 1941–1968 but in 1985 she wrote her crime novel, finally translated this year […]
Alisa Ganieva will be in New York City on Thursday, June 18 for a launch of her newly translated novel The Mountain and the Wall. The event is sponsored by Read Russia and will involve a discussion between the author and translator, publisher and academic Ronald Meyer at Book Culture on 112th St. The novel […]
“But Pushkin’s birthday in June came and went, and soon enough New Year’s was coming up, and I still hadn’t heard anything. I had to admit I’d fallen for a scam. It was too late to do anything but laugh.” From Russian-American writer Olga Zilberbourg’s great short story in B O D Y “What Goes […]
Romanian writer Bogdan Suceavă will be speaking on the sources of his recently translated into English novella Miruna, a Tale, more precisely, he’ll be speaking about “Folklore, Myth, and History: Merging the Real with the Unreal in Romanian Storytelling”, which I’m willing to bet is something very few of you are capable of speaking about. […]
“What does it matter where you die, where you’re buried? It’s where you live that counts.” My burst of confidence clearly wasn’t being reciprocated. “I’m not so sure that dying in Omsk is any worse than living there,” Adam responded, his eyes staring blankly into a future of factory smokestacks, grimy snow and excessive drinking… […]
“It all began with a rather unusual encounter in a first-class compartment of the Belgrade-Skopje express train.” So begins Aleksandar Prokopiev’s short story “Papradishki” translated from the Macedonian by Will Firth. But from the beginning, which could be the opening chapter of a detective novel with references to Hercule Poirot and Maigret, the story enters […]
From fairy tales retold with some irreverent twists, along with scenes from the Macedonian past, present and unreality to two very different worlds of implicit and explicit violence on either end of Soviet domination – one in Dagestan after the fall of communism, the other in newly occupied Prague in the 50s. Innocence; or, Murder […]
PEN America has announced the recipients of this year’s PEN/Heim Translation Fund grants and there’s some great writing from Central and Eastern Europe in the works as well as from the rest of the world. First of all, B O D Y’s own Stephan Delbos along with Tereza Novická won for their translation of The […]
The Prague book fair is underway and I had to take refuge from the Friday crowds of schoolchildren in my local café, which, as it turns out, is crowded with slightly older schoolchildren trying to look even older through chain-smoking and midafternoon glasses of wine. Book World Prague 2015’s Guest of Honor is Egypt and […]
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