“That New Year little Mensur Ćeman learned that Grandfather Frost really did exist, but that he was not the kind old man from the Coca-Cola ad bringing colorfully wrapped presents for the children—he was an infidel arsonist, and it was because of him that he now lived at his Uncle Irfan’s and had to go […]
B O D Y’s Saturday European Fiction this week was an excerpt from the novel The Swimmers by Joaquín Pérez Azaústre, published today August 27, 2013. The title, and not only the title, is evocative of another very well-known short story and film, “The Swimmer”, written by John Cheever and published in 1964 and brought […]
“These are pursuits which escape his comprehension, though he knows they exist, that all this human matter and its temporal framework are what the city feeds on: what would happen if all these people suddenly vanished into thin air, if the children never went back to school and their parents failed to appear punctually and […]
The most recent work in B O D Y’s Saturday European Fiction was “Scribbles” by Macedonian writer Rumena Bužarovska, while a month earlier there was a story by another Macedonian writer, Ivan Dodovski, who has another work forthcoming in the magazine. Macedonia is a country of just over two million people but has its share […]
“The pens… the pencils… the paper… look… I’ve been writing,” I said to him, taking my wet hands out of the fridge again. Water began to drip onto the mess of paper on the kitchen bench. “What are these squiggles? What on earth have you been doing?” He started to grab my little hurricanes and […]
This doesn’t have anything to do with Central and Eastern European writing but I was very happy to publish an excerpt from Argentine writer Carlos Busqued’s debut novel Under This Terrible Sun in B O D Y and so am posting it here. It’s a truly phenomenal novel – dark but not gloomy, filled with […]
Milan Kundera wasn’t the only Czech writer to leave Czechoslovakia for France in the 1970s. Living a shadowy existence in another country is the subject of Lubomír Martínek’s story “Refugee” translated by Charles Sabatos. “Because the harbor was such a favored refuge for people escaping from various regimes, a lot of former political prisoners lived […]
At Deutsche Welle there is article about the new Berlin-based publisher Frisch & Co. Run by E.J. Van Lanen the e-book publisher is putting out a fascinating selection of novels in translation from Germany, Austria, Spain, Argentina and Italy. I have just read the debut novel they put out by Argentine writer Carlos Busqued, Under […]
On March 7, 2005 the hero of Selvedin Avdić’s brilliant and captivating novel Seven Terrors decides to get up out of bed after nine months of self-imposed apathy as a result of having been left by his wife. Ready to return to life what he actually returns to is horror. Read the book review in […]
Manuscripts don’t burn, but they can sure be kept locked away a long time. In February 1961, KGB agents came to Vasily Grossman’s apartment and confiscated the typescript, manuscript and virtually everything connected to the novel Life and Fate completed the previous year. Now, 52 years later and a mere 20 or so years after […]
literalab 