The London Book Fair will take place from April 11 – 16th with a focus on contemporary Russian literature. The lineup includes the presence of 50 of the country’s most prominent writers and literary figures, including the author of the modern classic Pushkin House Andrei Bitov, Ludmila Ulitskaya and Boris Akunin among many others. Paying […]
Choosing a new translation of a lesser known work by Leo Tolstoy – How Much Land Does a Man Need – for its inaugural publication, as Calypso Editions has done, might not seem the most typical choice for an independent publisher. The short story is a moral fable of a peasant lured by the devil […]
At the Fiction Writer’s Review there is a great interview with Vladislav Todorov, whose debut novel Zift was published in English last year. About a thief named Moth unjustly imprisoned for murder in 1944 he is released in the communist Bulgaria of 1963 only to be poisoned by his former criminal partner, Slug. In the […]
On the Slovak Project Forum’s Salon website Russian novelist Victor Erofeyev laments Russian indifference to the dictators of the world. Whether it’s Qaddafi or Lukashenko, whose regime recently issued a blacklist of international figures not to be mentioned on state-controlled media in Belarus – a list that includes Victor Erofeyev – protests have been virtually […]
From 1908 to 1922 Franz Kafka worked at the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague. Considering his work was virtually unknown in his homeland after his death, then banned successively by German occupiers and the communist regime, Kafka’s traces in his former city were not very well guarded. Today though, […]
On Hungarian Literature Online a review of György Spiró’s yet to be translated Spring Exhibition, a novel whose main character misses out on the 1956 uprising due to a hemorrhoid operation. There is also an interview with the author where he talks about the difficulty of dealing with anachronistic communist lingo and his memories of […]
Calypso Editions is a new artist-run, cooperative press that showed its uniqueness right from the start, launching with a new translation of Tolstoy’s classic yet lesser known novella How Much Land Does a Man Need in December 2010. The next release was a bilingual Polish-English collection by the Polish poet Anna Swir (Świrszczyńska) called Building […]
On March 24, 2011 Czech-born French writer Milan Kundera will become just the twelfth writer to have his collected works published in the prestigious Bibliothèque de La Pléiade edition during his lifetime. Published by Gallimard, the initial volume will include Kundera’s novels originally written in Czech, which form the bulk of his work. Having left […]
The latest issue of Drunken Boat is out, including my short story “Literary Theft” – a story about, among other things – a literary theft, St. Petersburg and a nefarious urban legend. “Literary theft!” Ivan cried, suddenly going into some kind of rapture. “You stole that from my poem!”—Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov Read the story […]
Franz Kafka never had the fortune, whether good or bad, of being just a writer. During his lifetime he hardly published anything and had a firm principle against making his living with his pen. After his death it became even worse. He went from being a one-man Jewish oracle to a 20th Century prophet of […]
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