As I made my way through Frankfurt Airport on the way back to Prague from the book fair a strange incident took place, something that reflects a new and interesting trend in writing from Central and Eastern Europe – certainly in terms of the books getting translated into English – but which almost got me […]
So it’s not entirely surprising that a bestselling book about a fanatical Islamic assassin is on display at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair. There was one last year and the year before as well. They have been doing brisk business these past ten years or so. The difference in this case is that Alamut by […]
American literary magazines and blogs have been awash with all the autumn releases – the so-called heavyweights (yawn) and many others of varying merit and interest. For a little perspective it’s interesting to look at Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza’s 20 most interesting fall books, as noted on Slovakia’s Project Forum Salon. Because the list is […]
Prague German Writers – Gustav Meyrink He was twenty-three years old and living alone in Prague. A wounded heart caused him to look at his life up to that point as shallow and empty. Gustav Meyrink had just put a farewell letter to his mother in an envelope and reached for his revolver, when he […]
There is something as poetic as it is sad that one of the great Russian-Jewish writers of the latter half of the 20th century worked as a pathologist (worked, that is, until the powers that be demoted and eventually fired him). The New Yorker has a very short story by the magnificent author of Summer […]
It begins in Berlin in November 1943 as British bombs gradually do their part in shattering both the illusion and reality of the Thousand-Year Reich. Sergey Nabokov, the gay brother of then still largely unknown Vladimir, blurts out a pro-English statement at the ministry where he works as a translator that he knows full well […]
For many people the idea that we invent ourselves is, at the very least, an uncomfortable truth, while for others it is nothing less than blasphemy, a dirty secret to be warded off by waving crosses and national flags. We are where we come from, they say, formed by the way our parents raised us […]
Russian writer and journalist Vlas Doroshevich is not the only writer of parablelike stories exploring issues of justice and power who died in the 1920’s and whose work seems to illuminate the much darker period of history that followed his death, when the liquid that smoothed the grinding wheels of bureaucracy was revealed to be […]
My review of Andrzej Stasiuk’s On the Road to Babadag in the summer issue of The Cerise Press. “They lived in the old Jewish quarter, at the edge of a Slovak town, at the foot of a Hungarian castle, so in order to exist and not disappear, they had to create their own rules, their […]
A year spent in Prague is hardly an unusual experience these days for students, former students and all sorts of uncategorizable people in various phases of life. But the story of a South-American Indian spending a year in Prague back in 1908 presents a unique and fascinating story that seems as likely to come from […]
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