“Better still if I begin with the heart of the matter. That we are poets, and that life has already maimed us quite a bit. At the hearing, I will say what I had told my boss while he was writing my last check: ‘When you read biographies of the greats, you come across mention […]
The latest issue of Asymptote is out with an awesome Latin America Fiction Feature, including work by Sergio Chejfec, Cristina Peri Rossi, Lina Meruane and Julián Herbert as well as an essay by César Aira on Osvaldo Lamborghini. The esteemed translators bringing this work into English include many who have worked with B O D […]
In 1999 Marcos Giralt Torrente’s novel Paris was the unanimous selection for Spain’s XVII Premio Herralde de Novela by a jury consisting of Roberto Bolaño, Salvador Clotas, Juan Cueto, Ester Tusquets, and the publisher Jorge Herralde. Last week Giralt Torrente won Italy’s prestigious book prize, the Premio Strega Europeo, for his third novel Tiempo de […]
In an age when we are being bombarded by articles about the end of reading and how today’s uncultivated youth only play violent video games, surf the web, mindlessly tap on the iPads and do other things that I can’t even identify it’s positively heartening to read something that starts off like this: “It would […]
A Brezhnev era satire of Soviet repression, a book of short stories revolving around the siege of Sarajevo and poems from “Perhaps the most famous Russian poet of the twentieth century. ” In other words, beach reading. Poems of Osip Mandelstam Peter France writes in his foreword: “I have always been conscious that Mandelstam was an […]
“Here, paradise. There, at home, the law. The woman on the steps is around forty-five years old and J knows her, any time you pass by she’s sure to be standing there; the window panes are painted red so no one can see in, and in the doorway there’s a yellowed poster with a woman […]
A lot of early 20th century Moscow, Paris (through Russian eyes) and Berlin this week, though also some interstellar travel, 21st century Berlin and more. Black Snow by Mikhail Bulgakov After being saved from a suicide attempt by the appearance of a literary editor, the journalist and failed novelist Sergei Maxudov has a book suddenly […]
Do you ever stay awake nights wondering how to keep your finger on the pulse of contemporary fiction? Of course you do. Well, the answer is actually very simple – read B O D Y’s Saturday European Fiction. For example, The Guardian has a laudatory review of last week’s excerpted novel The Blue Room by […]
“The Berliner wants to be loved now too, and would gladly trade the familiar admiration of serious folk for the affections of the international idlers’ colony that seeks, in London and especially in Paris, a climate for pleasures high and low. I find this pandering and chasing after people undignified, and anyway it leads to […]
On June 13 the British Library is holding a seminar entitled “Balkan Day” with an absolutely fantastic lineup of Balkan writers that includes Dubravka Ugrešić, Vladislav Bajac, Igor Štiks, Andrej Nikolaidis, Muharem Bazdulj, Dragan Kujundžić, Christina Pribicevic-Zoric and Alex Drace-Francis. There will also be an event with Rosie Goldsmith “Balkanisation: the pick of recent Balkan […]
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