There I was, taking a perfectly innocent stroll through the woods, passing an overturned tree stump I had seen a thousand times before when I made out a shadowy figure lingering behind it, standing there suspiciously still. He looked Russian, though it was hard to tell because it was foggy and he had such a […]
Today in Literature informs us that it was this day in 1896 that saw the premiere of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull in St. Petersburg. The opening bombed, in a large part because the audience came expecting a conventional farce rather than the type of wordy drama that Chekhov has become famous for. Although driven backstage […]
Miroslav Penkov, author of East of the West:A Country in Stories, has a post on the official blog of The Story Prize about how when he first arrived in the US, in spite of telling friends he would wait to write in English until he felt comfortable with the language, he began submitting stories written […]
It begins in Prague’s Old Town of the well-known cobblestone, labyrinthine streets, where Franz Kafka was born and raised, but in this case refers more to the city of crystal ashtrays, miniature stone Golems, Kafka tee-shirts and guided tours. As the editors of “Kafkaesque: Stories Inspired by Franz Kafka” point out in their introduction, “we […]
Banned Books Week was recently celebrated in the US but the Russian Orthodox Church is choosing to mark the occasion with a somewhat different approach. Moscow Patriarchate PR director Vsevolod Chaplin stated that Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez should be banned because they “romanticize perverted passions that […]
Earlier this year it was announced that Irish writer John Banville was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize. Now it is being a bit coy and imprecise of the Kafka Society to only say that Banville is coming to Prague at the end of October to accept the award without, for example, naming the actual day. […]
From October 19 to 21 neighbor of my former graduate school Claremont McKenna University is hosting a cenntenial festival devoted to Czesław Miłosz with a interesting program and varied array of guests. Absolute tops in terms of title is Polish intellectual, historian and journalist Adam Michnik’s talk – Miłosz: Man Among Scorpions, which seems to […]
“But who would Joyce be if he wrote not in English but, say, in Albanian?” It is not only the existence of Central Europe that can be called into question apparently, but of Europe itself. “Perhaps Europe as a single entity actually does not exist after all,” begins a lecture presented at last month’s European […]
The first installment of literalab: Best Reads, in which sometimes neglected books from and about Central and Eastern Europe are put in the spotlight they deserve .. The Degaev Affair That reality is stranger than fiction must once have been an original and thought-provoking point. Today, it is taken for granted, a cliché even, leaving […]
Czech writers such as Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal and Josef Škvorecký were an imposing presence in world literature in the last few decades of the 20th century. Today, a new generations of Czech novelists is beginning to make its mark. Coming off a recent appearance at the International Literature Festival Berlin, novelist Tomáš Zmeškal spoke […]
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