An introductory guest post at Beauty is a Sleeping Cat November is German Literature Month and there has already been a lot going on at blogs such as Beauty is a Sleeping Cat. The first part of my own contribution went up as a guest post on that excellent blog as an introduction to the […]
What do Tolstoy, a clothing chain, Elif Batuman and a Hollywood blockbuster have in common? Nothing. But wait, that was before the launching of Banana Republic’s Anna Karenina clothing line to profit from the publicity of the new Tolstoy novel adaptation about to hit the theaters. Elif Batuman gets thrown in there because the LA […]
There’s a burst of Polish crime in the UK this week starting at today’s Folkestone Book Festival with the appearance of A.M. Bakalar and Zygmunt Miłoszewski as part of Polish Book Autumnfest. Bakalar’s Madame Mephisto has been reviewed here, while I’ve only briefly noted Miłoszewski’s excellent Entanglement and will have a review of his recently […]
Seminal Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky has been back in the limelight as of late due to a slew of translations by Shushan Avagyan published and forthcoming from Dalkey Archive, including Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar and Energy of Delusion, a pair of works of literary theory, as well as the more essayistic/historical […]
“Why don’t you all f-fade away And don’t try to dig what we all s-s-say I’m not trying to cause a big s-s-sensation I’m just talkin’ ’bout my g-g-g-generation” – The Who, “My Generation” n+1 magazine has an assessment of the influence of critical theory on American novelists who came of age in the 80s, […]
Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko is appearing at the University of Buffalo through November 3 for a series of events devoted to his work. He will read his poetry on November 1, hold discussions of his poetry and film, screen his film Stalin’s Funeral starring Vanessa Redgrave and be present at a Buffalo Philharmonic performance of […]
“Insallah,” he said, and took a long drag. “If NATO gives the green light, then we attack.” “Twins,” a story of the Libyan uprising from Hungarian writer and war correspondent Sándor Jászberényi is featured on Pilvax Magazine. And so yet another Central European writer has devoted his attention to the Arab/Islamic world without a peep […]
At Russia Beyond the Headlines novelist Zakhar Prilepin has written a broadside against the neglect of contemporary Russian literature, ongoing simplifications of Russia he sees coming from the West, and makes a case for a non-parodic, traditional, conservative form of Russian writing as it existed in the time of Tolstoy and Chekhov. Well, he is […]
Yuri Andrukhovych came to Prague’s Forum 2000 more as a journalist from a country very much in the center of debates about political liberties and freedom of the press than as the writer of the postmodern absurdist novel Perverzion. At the forum itself he discussed the situation of Ukraine and its beleaguered yet extremely resilient […]
Prague’s online literary journal B O D Y has four short and fantastic pieces by Daniil Kharms translated by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky. They are described as poems but like much of Kharms’ work go beyond typical literary categories, but to see how a writer begins in mid-spit, moves to émigré biography and ends […]
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