At various times since the fall of the Iron Curtain there have been outbreaks of fear that hordes of criminals would cross the Czech, Polish, Slovak, Slovene and Hungarian borders to pillage the wealth of Western Europe. In 2012, it looks as if this long awaited crime wave is actually coming to pass, though in […]
Thirst by Russian novelist Andrei Gelasimov is the story of a Chechen war veteran who returns home with a face disfigured in a grenade attack. He seems content to remain holed up in his apartment with a plentiful supply of vodka, staring at the TV until the search for a former comrade pulls him out […]
Book jacket design is an ever interesting topic which exhibits an often sharp difference of aesthetics among its practitioners. I have written about it before in interviewing Peter Mendelsund about his designs for a recent edition of Kafka’s works. On his own blog Mendelsund has recently offered an insider’s view of designing book covers in […]
Murder in 1930s Budapest provides a panorama of a lost world Vilmos Kondor’s Budapest Noir begins with a pair of deaths. On the one hand, these deaths practically could not have less to do with one another. The first is the real life death of Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös on October 6, 1936 in Munich; […]
A WWII crime novel depicts the hunt for Czech resistance fighters, their German contact and the perpetrator of a seemingly impossible crime “And if I had really been as single-minded and independent as Heydrich said I was, I would probably have told him he was wrong: murder – even political assassination – is rarely ever […]
The Guggenheim Museum has put 65 art books and exhibition catalogues online. They can be read online or downloaded in a number of different formats – and all for free. The selection covers a wide range of Modern Art but from literalab’s geographical focus the highlights are a heavy dose of Kandinsky. Besides his 1911 […]
“The ambulances’ ominous horns wailed in the black tunnels of the streets, like a lonesome scream for help. The dancing stopped here and there and the unsettled crowd quickly dispersed to their homes. In Montparnasse, the Latin Quarter and a few other districts inhabited by foreigners, dancing continued. The horns howled relentlessly, mournful and terror-stricken.” […]
Poland has seen more than its share of monstrosities, having been invaded at one time or other by Nazis, Prussians, Hapsburgs, White as well as Red Russians, and even the Mongol Golden Horde. Therofore, if you think of the words monster and Poland in the same sentence it is most likely in reference to a […]
A selection of non-fiction about Central and Eastern Europe noted by critics in the year’s “Best of” lists The best Central and Eastern European non-fiction books of 2011 differ significantly from the fiction in that with only a couple of exceptions they are written about the region in English rather than being from the region […]
A selection of fiction from the Czech Republic to Russia noted by critics in the year’s “Best of” lists The “Best of” lists that come out at the end of the year tend to confirm received opinion for the most part and so it is not a big surprise that translated fiction does not make […]
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