In a recent article on revivals of plays by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, Los Angeles Times theater critic Charles McNulty uses the occasion to identify some shortcomings in contemporary theater that apply equally, if not even more closely, to contemporary fiction. He distinguishes the work of these two modern greats not only in degree […]
BookExpo America (BEA) starts June 2 in New York, with a fantastic looking ReadRussia program. Guests include Russian émigré writers and editors such as Marina Adamovich, Alexander Genis and Yuri Miloslavsky. Miloslavsky mentions the correspondence between Tsar Alexander I and Thomas Jefferson, something which would certainly cause Jefferson to lose any potential Tea Party support. […]
Czech author and publisher Martin Vopěnka was a guest at the Prague Writers’ Festival in 2012 and spoke to literalab about his path to becoming a writer, the influence of his studying physics on his most recent novel and his foray into children’s and young adult fiction in The Sleeping City. Read the full article […]
On the BBC’s “A Point of View” writer Will Self takes on readers and critics who oppose the use of difficult words, and by extension, of difficult art altogether. The main thrust of his critique is that educators, critics and the reading public are demanding that the bar be lowered from a level of reading […]
The Franz Kafka society announced today that this year’s Franz Kafka Prize goes to writer and literary theorist Daniela Hodrová. There were a few years where the Kafka Prize was seen as a golden globe-like preview of the Nobel Prize for literature after Elfriede Jelinek and Harold Pinter won both in successive years. My guess […]
Today marks what would have been the 72nd birthday of poet Joseph Brodsky. Two months after his death in January 1996, Czeslaw Milosz wrote in Index on Censorship of what was at stake in Brodsky’s poetry: “In one of his essays Brodsky reflected that Mandelstam was a poet of culture. He too was a poet […]
Congratulations to John Elsworth for winning this year’s Rossica Translation Prize for his translation of Andrei Bely’s Petersburg. I don’t remember exactly how he put it but I remember Nabokov writing how untranslatable the novel is. Hopefully, this means he was wrong. The other shortlisted books all sound great – and include Vasily Grossman’s The […]
File this under: it couldn’t happen in America. It is one of the stranger publishing stories I’ve seen in a while. The trophy wife of former Czech Prime Minister Jiří Paroubek, Petra Paroubková, is publishing a Czech translation of a guide for brothel owners by someone who apparently knows what he’s talking about. The author […]
Sunday, May 27 sees the beginning of the 2012 Festival of the European Short Story (FESS) in Zagreb. The festival has a fantastic-looking new website which unfortunately still has some kinks to work out (clicking on a link for an interview with David Albahari I arrived at a wordless page that had a photograph of […]
An article on Publishing Perspectives examining the success of Book World Prague in spite of the economic downturn Everybody is crying, there is a drop in sales of up to 20%. There is a big problem with piracy as well as a big problem with the copying of textbooks. Nevertheless, for the first time in […]
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