Thirst by Russian novelist Andrei Gelasimov is the story of a Chechen war veteran who returns home with a face disfigured in a grenade attack. He seems content to remain holed up in his apartment with a plentiful supply of vodka, staring at the TV until the search for a former comrade pulls him out […]
Jewish Book Week (JBW) inaugurates its 60th year on Feb. 18 in London, with a strong showing of Central and Eastern European literary events. Following a flight without end Joseph Roth might have thought of himself as an abandoned citizen of the vanquished Austro-Hungarian Empire, but from his origins in Brody, East-Galicia (today Ukraine) to […]
Jewish Book Week inaugurates its 60th year on February 18 in London, with a strong showing of Central and Eastern European literary events. Joseph Roth , Daša Drndić, Ludmila Ultiskaya , Umberto Eco, The Golem and more … “I have nothing to do with the landscape, nothing to do with the sky. Nor anything to […]
February 13 is the anniversary of the Dresden bombing that took place in 1945. The bombing continues to provoke debate and beyond its historical significance has a number of connections with literary and cultural history. In the Irish Independent Eoghan Harris writes about “The moral dilemma posed by Dresden,” pointing out the impossibility of a […]
Wisława Szymborska died on February 1 and as the remembrances and tributes pour forth a couple of very good ones that have come out in the last few days include Ruth Franklin’s “A Requiem to an Age of Brilliant Polish Poetry” at The New Republic and James Hopkin’s recollection of an interview with the poet […]
February 10 was the date of possibly the worst of the tragic and premature deaths that have haunted Russian literary greats over the past two centuries. This was the day in 1837 that Alexander Sergeievich Pushkin died from the wounds he had received in a duel fought two days earlier with his brother-in-law and suspected […]
Book jacket design is an ever interesting topic which exhibits an often sharp difference of aesthetics among its practitioners. I have written about it before in interviewing Peter Mendelsund about his designs for a recent edition of Kafka’s works. On his own blog Mendelsund has recently offered an insider’s view of designing book covers in […]
Murder in 1930s Budapest provides a panorama of a lost world Vilmos Kondor’s Budapest Noir begins with a pair of deaths. On the one hand, these deaths practically could not have less to do with one another. The first is the real life death of Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös on October 6, 1936 in Munich; […]
Two nominees from Belarus have been put forward for the Nobel Prize in Literature and the names reflect the split between the Lukashenko-friendly, officially sanctioned and its opposite in the country. The official nominee of the Union of Writers of Belarus is Georgi Marchuk, his third time in the running. The head of the official […]
After arresting him and then throwing him out of the country the (admittedly different, i.e. not quite Soviet) Russian government is redressing the poetic balance by opening a museum to poet Joseph Brodsky in his former St. Petersburg apartment. The catch – the city government owns all the rooms of the apartment except one, and […]
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