Read Russia I just discovered the Read Russia 2012 site which has everything from video interviews with Olga Slavnikova, Boris Akunin and other well-known writers to a timeline with information on a range of Russian writers – from Andrei Gelasimov, whose Thirst I highly recommend, to some writers who look young enough to be my […]
The American compulsion to write autobiographical novels is a literary dead end Almost exactly a year ago, with the PEN World Voices Festival of international literature taking place I used the occasion of reviewing Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2011 to prop up the Berlin Wall I thought of as separating European and American fiction. […]
The first solo retrospective of Jindřich Heisler provides a long overdue look at a unique man who created unique art under unique circumstances Jindřich Heisler: Surrealism under Pressure at Chicago’s Art Institute presents 70 works by the still little-known Czech Surrealist whose work straddles the line between a variety of artistic media. The exhibition also […]
Literary roundup: Pre-war Warsaw and Russian dystopias The first English translation of a book by Polish-Jewish author Józef Hen will be published later this month, according to the Polish Book Institute’s website. Nowolipie Street is a 1991 memoir of growing up in the lost world of Jewish Warsaw in the 1920s and 30s, up until […]
Jerome Rothenberg was a guest at this year’s Prague Writers’ Festival and the acclaimed American poet spoke to me about his experience translating German and Czech poets, giving Nezval a voice in English and not speaking Yiddish with Paul Celan. Literalab: You’ve translated a number of German poets such as Paul Celan, and I was […]
One of the landmarks of modern theater, Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade, will be performed at Prague’s Bohnice psychiatric hospital As a play about asylum inmates putting on a play of the death of French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, Weiss’ work already casts a kaleidoscopic glance at political conformity and extremism of two distinct eras of history. With […]
Big Russian novels are in the air as of late. At The Millions eight experts weigh in on George Steiner’s Tolstoy or Dostoevsky question. I read Steiner’s book a fairly long time ago and don’t remember him actually answering that question, which seems to be the standard reaction among the experts. Actually, I think the […]
The Treatise on Mannequins is a theater piece inspired by Bruno Schulz’s art and writing, using music, visual art and acting to transmit a “world beyond time and space” to the audience. Director Krzysztof Żyliński talked to Czech Position about putting Schulz’s unique sensibility on stage and of the multinational theater company which resembles Schulz’s […]
Kafka/Borges – Prague/Buenos Aires biennale takes place in the Czech capital this year with an added pair of literary greats in the mix Literary festivals are usually devoted to individual writers or the writers from a particular language or country. That a festival can be devoted to a pair of writers who never met one […]
The all-Bulgarian issue of Absinthe will be published in early May. The issue (#17) features writing by Georgi Gospodinov, Milen Ruskov, Emilia Dvoryanova, Vladislav Todorov, Krassimir Damianov, Kristin Dimitrova, Virginia Zaharieva, Vladimir Zarev, Yanitza Radeva, Ivan Dimitrov, Theodora Dimova, Zdravka Evtimova, Dimiter Kenarov, Maria Doneva, Niki Boikov and Stefan Ivanov. There will also be an eight page portfolio of […]
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