The two novellas and five short stories that make up The Bridge Over the Neroch: And Other Works comprise the rest of the writing left to us by the author of Summer in Baden-Baden, Leonid Tsypkin. New Directions is bringing the book out in February 2013 and you can read my review in the 2nd […]
An essay on the death, music and aesthetic of the composer Anton Webern at Prague’s B O D Y. “Anton Webern was killed on September 15, 1945 in Mittersill, Austria. For a long time no one knew the exact circumstances of the great composer’s death and the musical world more or less accepted the mystery. […]
On Wednesday January 16, the American Center in Prague will be hosting an event (PDF) exploring the themes of the recently translated Czech novel Rustic Baroque by Jiří Hájíček. Titled “Collectivization – Restitution – Literature”, the panel discussion will feature the author as well as the novel’s translator Gale A. Kirking and collectivization historian Jiří […]
The ongoing Anxiety series at The New York Times features a contribution from László Krasznahorkai that might be described as a bit beyond anxious. “I’ve been living in complete silence for months, I might say for years …” it starts out, and gets worse (or better) from there. Russian Vampires Russian Life’s Chtenia 21 is […]
British novelist Hari Kunzru has an excellent and chilling article at the New Yorker’s Page Turner on the extreme lengths the current authoritarian right-wing government in Hungary is going to consolidate its hold not only on the country’s political life but on its cultural life, ensuring that theater, film, art and the rest remain Christian, […]
The Millions has put out a long and translation-heavy list of books to be published in 2013 in the US. There are quite a few Central and Eastern European novels to look forward to, including a few I have already read, either because they came out in the UK last year or because I took […]
On January 9, historian Timothy Snyder and director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage David Marwell will meet at the museum in New York to discuss the unbelievable story of Witold Pilecki. Known as the only man to voluntarily go to Auschwitz to be able to provide a first-hand account of the atrocities taking place […]
Looking at the list of my top 10 books from 2012, plus an added three from 2011 and two from even earlier, I can’t help noticing that besides the geographical commonality (they’re all by writers from Central and Eastern Europe except the Chilean Carlos Cerda, though even he was writing about being in exile in […]
It’s the end of the world and at Russia Beyond the Headlines (RBTH) they ask a sample of Russian writers such as German Sadulaev, Dmitry Bykov, Zakhar Prilepin and even Russian-American Gary Shteyngart about how they would spend their last day of human existence knowing the Mayans were right. The answers are interesting and unfortunately […]
At The Guardian author of Madame Mephisto, A. M. Bakalar writes about the UK’s invisible Polish minority, describing the wide divergence in identities between those who think of themselves as British and those who continue to exist in an almost exclusively Polish environment. The all-too-common assumption of Poles coming to the UK for higher wages […]
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