Slovak writer Pavel Vilikovský on facts, realism and what he really learned about Central Europeanism from Olomouc and Camus Pavel Vilikovský’s Ever Green Is …: Collected Prose was published by Northwestern University Press in 2002, while a short story (also included in the NWU collection) came out in Dalkey’s Slovak fiction anthology in 2010. […]
An interview with the creator of the comicbook Baroque anti-hero Xavier of the House of the Sorrowful Snows Since 1989 and the reemergence of Prague on the world stage, the city has become ever more closely linked with its Baroque artistic heritage. Write a novel that takes place in Prague and chances are the book […]
“A curious novel, Kafka’s Amerika: indeed, why should this young twenty-nine-year-old writer have laid his first novel in a continent where he had never set foot? This choice shows a clear intent: to not do realism; better yet: to not do a serious work. He did not even try to palliate his ignorance by research; […]
There must be something other than pollen in the air, because literary disputes have been both more frequent and more heated than usual: the novel isn’t dead, one earnest article claims, it just happens to be the focus of a rearguard attack by the defenders of privilege. The ongoing debate over the value or worthlessness […]
Following the opening day of a conference on “Scholars in Exile and Dictatorships of the 20th Century” being held in Prague, I trailed behind a group of international academics as they were carefully led the few blocks from the National Technical Museum to the hotel where “Welcome Drinks” were going to be served. It was […]
On May 24, 1940 the great Russian poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad. And while the 71st birthday of the man who was viewed by many, including Anna Akhmatova, as pulling the country’s poetic tradition out of the Stalinist ashes may not be occasion for parades on the streets of Moscow or […]
Michael Scammell came to the Prague book fair with two seemingly related tasks – to speak about his biography of Arthur Koestler, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth Century Skeptic, and to participate in a panel on Index on Censorship, of which he was the founding editor. And while issues of censorship […]
Link: Saudis at Prague book fair: cultural legitimacy for sale On the controversy surrounding Saudi Arabia being the Guest of Honor at Book World Prague 2011 and the Saudi writers that weren’t there, as well as the idea that balancing the “Arab focus” of the event with a broad range of panels and writers was […]
Laurent Binet, author of HHhH, had a lot to say about the local setting of his succesful Goncourt-winning debut novel which recounts the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich carried out by two Czech paratroppers during WWII. About the documentary aspect of his novel and whether it will be an ongoing characteristic of his work, Binet replied […]
Book World Prague kicked off May 12 at the historic Industrial Palace, site of the Communist Party congress for 41 years during the regime of the same name. That the political landscape has changed considerably is evident even before stepping inside the building. With the opening ceremony approaching, the palace’s imposing art-nouveau façade was matched […]
literalab 