The Czech Magnesia Litera award for the book of the year has gone to Michal Ajvaz for his novel Lucemburská zahrada (The Luxembourg Gardens). The novel is about a teacher in Paris named Paul who enters some kind of fantasy world where an unknown language is spoken when he accidentally types a word he hadn’t […]
In celebration of its 40th anniversary Index on Censorship is opening up its entire archives for 40 days from March 26 to, if I did the math correctly (no sure thing) means until May 5. After that all issues published before 2010 will remain available through the end of this year. Based on a quick […]
“As in the Soviet past, bright new futures were elusive. Which didn’t mean they wouldn’t come, only that some cost was involved. And in these infant days of Slav capitalism, anything good – bright future included – was extremely pricey. Free, gratis and for nothing was a concept of the past.” – from The Case […]
The mystery at the heart of Jürgen Fauth’s debut novel Kino extends from the smoke-filled cabarets of Weimar Berlin and the era’s legendary silent films to a Brooklyn apartment of two newlyweds and a decrepit drug-filled house in the Hollywood Hills. The transatlantic story comes from a German-born American writer who tells Readux about the […]
The newly established Czech Book Award (Cena Česká kniha) has announced its shortlist of 20 titles out of 109 titles submitted by Czech publishers. A list of seven finalists will come out in April and the winner will be announced as part of Book World Prague on May 19. Shortlisted authors that can be read […]
Prague in the ‘20s was a hotbed of émigré Russian intellectual life In the wake of the Russian Revolution and civil war Prague played a surprisingly large and often unacknowledged role in 20th century Russian literature and thought. While the exiled aristocratic and political exiles settled in Paris and most of Russia’s intelligentsia chose Berlin, […]
An article on Aleksandar Hemon and Nicole Krauss presenting Dalkey’s Best European Fiction 2012, on the good old translation conundrum, on old men no longer reading fiction (from a very good source) and another kind of cut in the publishing industry besides job cuts. Read the full article at Czech Position
The latest issue of the University of California at San Diego’s literature in translation magazine Alchemy includes Slovak actor/singer/writer Július Satinský’s Dostoevsky’s Letter translated by Magdalena Mullek. If you haven’t already been tempted to read it then a look at the story’s byline should more than convince you: “A letter from Fyodor Mikhailovich, of Great […]
Helen Epstein was not even a year old in the summer of 1948 when her father decided to take his family away from Czechoslovakia for a new life in the US. Having survived the Nazi concentration camps, he was unwilling to endure life under communism. Growing up in New York’s Czech émigré community, Epstein retained […]
“There is one kind of literature which never reaches the voracious masses. The work of creative writers, written out of the author’s real necessity, and for his own benefit. The awareness of a supreme egoism, wherein laws become significant. * Every page should explode, either because of its profound gravity, or its vortex, vertigo, newness, […]
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