In The Nation there’s a thorough and fantastic article about Bulgarian writer and exiled dissident Georgi Markov titled “A Captivating Mind: How Georgi Markov became the truth-teller of Bulgaria’s communist era, and paid for it with his life.” Playwright, novelist, essayist and journalist, Markov was murdered on orders of the Bulgarian secret service in London […]
Yiddish poems, a Ukrainian math adventure and Joycean cat-heavy view of Copenhagen are among the acclaimed children’s books at this year’s festival. The 51st edition of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair kicks of March 24 with Brazil as the guest of honor. As usual, there are a lot of interesting writers and books beings presented […]
Polish writer and journalist Jacek Hugo-Bader will be appearing at the Oxford Literary Festival on March 28 to recount “his journey through one of the remotest and baddest parts of Russia” in an event titled “Kolyma Diaries: A Journey into Russia’s Haunted Hinterland”: Hugo-Bader travelled the 2,000km Kolyma highway hearing the tales of those who […]
I have been expressing my admiration for Central European crime writing since I was practically a baby, but being a baby no one understood what I was saying, so it took until I started Literalab and began writing about it that my admiration took on intelligible form. Since then I have surveyed regional crime fiction […]
Today’s Authors & Translators featured translator is the celebrated Marian Schwartz (and her authors – we shouldn’t forget the authors, after all) with a fascinating interview. Among other things, she discusses her soon to be published version of Anna Karenina (August 2014) and the intimacy of being able to work personally with an author, something […]
“I’m making notes from Lacan, I turn the page in my notebook and come upon the sprawled foetus of a poem…” The beginning of the first of two poems by Tadeusz Dąbrowski translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in B O D Y. And that, after some Polish fiction by Agnieszka Taborska in last […]
Agnieszka Taborska’s novel Niedokończone życie Phoebe Hicks (The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks) was published in Poland in 2013. Selected excerpts of the completed translation by Ursula Phillips were published in Saturday European Fiction in B O D Y. In extracts from Polish reviews of the novel translated by Julia Sherwood you can read about […]
“When Phoebe Hicks conducted her first séance, when she became the first medium in New England, when her fame began to entice other women to embark on a similar career, no one foresaw, of course, what would distinguish her from her successors. This difference, not so crucial at first glance, fundamentally influenced Phoebe’s story.” From […]
The Leipzig Book Fair is underway as of yesterday, and as always there is a lot of eastward looking literary fare on the agenda, kicking off today with something about Euromaidan that has Yuri Andrukhovych, Andrei Kurkov and writer and singer Irina Karpa among the panel participants (I say “something about Euromaidan” because the program […]
The BTBA Fiction Longlist has just been released and, unlike the recently released International Foreign Fiction Prize 2014 longlist*, has some notable work from Central and Eastern Europe on it. First of all, regarding the IFFP list, and I don’t want to sound like Vladimir Putin (though I too have been accused of being both […]
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