In a bid to obtain the status of a “UNESCO Creative City of Literature,” Prague’s Municipal Library has put a literary map of the city online that locates both Czech and international writers in various parts of the city. At the moment the map is only in Czech (which I would think might hinder their […]
Polish quarterly magazine Res Publica Nowa has published a special English-language issue “Central Europe as City.” Besides the editorials, there are five articles from the issue available online on the Eurozine website and they contain some fascinating information. Articles cover an array of topics – from the multicultural history of today’s Bratislava to the Jews […]
Publishing collective Calypso Editions has followed up its new translation of Tolstoy’s How Much Land Does a Man Need and its collection of Polish poet Anna Swir’s poems about the Warsaw Uprising, Building the Barricade and Other Poems, with an anthology of Romanian poetry titled Of Gentle Wolves. Translated by Martin Woodside the slim book […]
On August 12, 1952 Yiddish literary culture received a fatal blow when novelist Dovid Bergelson and poet Peretz Markish were among 13 Soviet Jews murdered in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison. The execution became known as the Night of the Murdered Poets, with three other poets also shot that night. The outcome of Stalin’s paranoid antisemitism was […]
Somewhere there is bound to be a librarian doing their earnest best to classify Miroslav Penkov’s brilliant debut collection of stories East of the West. At first glance it seems fairly straightforward. Penkov is Bulgarian and the book is subtitled “A country in stories” – that country being Bulgaria. Yet the book was written in […]
My review of the fourth volume of Canetti’s memoirs in the newly released issue of the Cerise Press. “I was living in England as its intellect decayed. I was a witness to the fame of a T.S. Eliot. Is it possible for people ever to repent sufficiently of that? An American brings over a Frenchman […]
Is the poet who engaged in grimace contests being fixed into the useful image of a European literary saint? The centenary of Czesław Miłosz falls on June 30 of this year amidst a more than yearlong array of festivals, readings, official declarations and celebrations stretching from the poet’s birthplace in Lithuania to Poland and the […]
Anna Andreyevna Gorenko was born on June 23, 1889. She went on to write some of the greatest poetry of the 20th century under the name of Anna Akhmatova. From “Requiem” ‘I arrive here as if I’ve come home!’ I’d like to name you all by name, but the list Has been removed and there […]
An article in Berlin literary magazine Readux about Arthur Koestler, his newly reissued Dialogue with Death and defining one of the 20th century’s most polarizing intellectual figures. Link: Koestler on Readux Photo – Arthur Koestler, Paris 1937 – by Fred Stein
Eastern European literature snuck its way into the pages of The Guardian last week when former Granta-editor Ian Jack revealed the hoax behind Albanian writer Jiri Kajane. Following publication of Kajane’s stories in American literary magazines such as Glimmer Train, the Chicago Review and the Michigan Quarterly Review in the mid 90s, Jack became interested […]
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