“This isn’t the placelessness of a fellow modernist writer like Kafka, but more closely resembles that of a hyperrealistic painting, where the attention to detail – the glint of light on a bottle, the folds of skin on the figure’s neck – obscure any sign of the surroundings. Felsen isn’t looking at the world through […]
WWII-era crime novel depicts hunt for Czech resistance fighters, their German contact and enactment of a seemingly impossible crime Prague Fatale is the eighth book by Philip Kerr that follows hard-nosed Berlin homicide detective Bernie Gunther as he navigates his way between the world of everyday street murders and the much more menacing variety of […]
The 2022 Winter Issue of B O D Y nears its end with my review of My Seven Lives by Agneša Kalinová and Jana Juráňová, translated from the Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood. The book is an interview memoir that covers Kalinová’s eventful life and is a fascinating reflection of 20th century history in […]
“Then there is a veritable panorama of the immediate post-’68 emigration process itself: from the border crossings that, again, resemble neither the dangerous escapes of previous eras nor those that would follow when the regime would seal the border. There are nervous train rides; nostalgic car rides; last looks; and sad goodbyes. There is Vienna, […]
Witches Sabbath By Maurice Sachs Translated from the French by Richard Howard 2020, Spurl Editions, 276 pp. Maurice Sachs was born in Paris in 1906, when the Belle Époque was giving way to modernity, and grew up nourished by that golden age of French culture in a way that seems unimaginable today. His grandfather was […]
The Calvert Journal has compiled a list of 100 books to read from Eastern Europe (also Central Europe) and Central Asia. It’s a fascinating list put together by a wide range of writers, translators, academics coming from a number of different countries and languages besides English. The list includes a number of books and writers […]
Books From Slovakia has a fantastic interview Daniela Balážová held with Slovak writer Pavol Rankov, author of the recently translated It Happened on the First of September. Among many topics Rankov talks about how the different translations deal with all the different languages used in the novel (spoiler: differently) and also talks about the lost multicultural […]
For the occassion of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Istros Books is publishing Ludovic Bruckstein’s collection With an Unopened Umbrella in the Pouring Rain, translated from the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth. Bookanista has an excerpt from the novel here as well as a review of a pair of novellas published by Istros as The Trap. There […]
In 1982, Ricardo Luis Melogno murdered four taxi drivers in the space of a week in Buenos Aires. He has been locked up in prison or psychiatric institutions ever since, and now is cast in a legal limbo from which he may never be released. Argentine writer Carlos Busqued, whose debut novel Under This Terrible […]
It Happened on the First of September (or Some Other Time)A Historical Novel from 1938 to 1968by Pavol RankovTranslated from the Slovak by Magdalena Mullek Reviewed by Michael Stein The 20th century has no shortage of places and times known for name changes and shifts of identity. There was Golden Age Hollywood, where Brooklyn-born Margarita […]
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