“While the gypsy woman held a garment in the air, offering it to the pineapple vendor, her teat slid from the mouth of her child, who squealed in hunger. The gypsy shoved her nipple, stiff and dripping milk, back between her child’s lips, his mouth filthy and his eyes sealed shut with pus.” From Josef […]
“Superman, you say?” Vassily mumbled, musing over the name which we all assumed he must have heard of. “And you say he has special powers . . you mean of thinking?” “No Vass, he can leap over a building in a single bound and stuff like that. Get it?” Suzie said. “In fact, no. I […]
“when dad came out he had to push his way through a raging crowd of invalids everyone with a limp except me later he showed me some monuments but to me Warsaw was a city of people missing limbs” From “Warsaw”, one of four poems by Polish poet Piotr Macierzynski published in B O D […]
From a book of essays that charts everything from the “listlessness of Central Europe to the ennui of the Low Countries” to a series of books that covers pretty much the rest of the bases by dealing with “Life and death—under water, and in the sky. Sinister picnics. Hellish cafeterias.” (If there’s anything else in […]
Author of Maidenhair and the just released The Light and the Dark, Mikhail Shishkin, wrote an article for English PEN on the Potemkin village of the Winter Olympics, now underway in Sochi at the cost of a mere $50 billion, a sum we can all agree is well worth it for a few weeks of […]
Tonight at 8 PM GMT / 9 PM CET / 3 PM EST / Noon PST, Christopher Crawford and Anthony Madrid will read and answer your questions during a live-streamed online reading at Transatlantic Poetry. Transatlantic Poetry Readings allow poets and audiences worldwide to come together in one virtual location. B O D Y […]
The story of the beautiful and tragic Dagny Juel, inspiration to Munch and Strindberg among others; Polish science-fiction, an autobiography of a physician and party girl in Weimar Berlin, Charlotte Wolff, and an English-language debut novel from Georgia are among the new books being featured this week. Nest of Worlds by Marek S. Huberath Nest […]
Natasha Perova, editor of Glas New Russian Writing, has a very interesting piece in PEN America on the Russian literary scene in which she discusses the young generation of writers (some of which Glas publishes due to their association with the Debut Prize) and what differentiates them from the writers of the Russian and Soviet […]
“Have I told you the story about the guy who butchered hogs?” “Which guy?” “The one who was in the Foreign Legion. Have I told you that one?” “Is it for real?” And so starts the very short story, “One Big Mess” by Croatian writer and author of Our Man in Iraq Robert Perišić in […]
Literalab favorite and author of the Death and the Penguin Andrey Kurkov has written a compelling piece about the protests and government crackdown in Ukraine for English PEN. The opening paragraph, with its account of the murder of two protesters and the abduction from a hospital of two opposition activists, one of whom was then […]
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