The latest issue of The Continental is out and includes my essay, “Fatherlessland”, a work about my father’s death, Prague as a city and film set, Nazis past and present, and a few other topics as well. The issue also includes an interview with Fran Lebowitz, a ghost story by film director Abel Ferrara, an […]
“Yes. The Mortkowitz funeral. I remember now. That was definitely yesterday.” Then, as if I’d suddenly turned radioactive, he spun on his heels and rushed away, leaving me to simmer in the soup of my bewilderment and humiliation. I felt that everyone was now looking at me, happy to have their attention momentarily diverted from […]
Marinetti was both the Malcolm McLaren and Johnny Rotten of his era, the impresario and figurehead of what was early 20th century punk. He charmed his audience with shock and provocation, telling his Russian hosts that the Kremlin was an absurdity, Tolstoy hypocritical, Dostoevsky hysterical, responded to a question about Russian art by asking if […]
“The Berliner wants to be loved now too, and would gladly trade the familiar admiration of serious folk for the affections of the international idlers’ colony that seeks, in London and especially in Paris, a climate for pleasures high and low. I find this pandering and chasing after people undignified, and anyway it leads to […]
This week’s Friday Pick in B O D Y: “Open the pages of one of Marek Krajewski’s Eberhard Mock novels and you plunge into a unique and haunting world. It is a world pressed between the oppressive shadows of the two World Wars and seemingly losing its mind because of it; a world of secret […]
When I went to see Jiří Hájíček talk about his novel Rustic Baroque (Selský baroko) at Prague’s American Center in mid-January he made an obvious but still very interesting point about what distinguishes the English-language translation of the book from the other translations that have come out so far. He said that not only for […]
An essay on the death, music and aesthetic of the composer Anton Webern at Prague’s B O D Y. “Anton Webern was killed on September 15, 1945 in Mittersill, Austria. For a long time no one knew the exact circumstances of the great composer’s death and the musical world more or less accepted the mystery. […]
And Werfel’s friendship with another Prague German writer named Franz From the time his first book of poetry Friend of the World was published to great success and acclaim when he was 21 until his death 34 years later in exile in Los Angeles, Franz Werfel didn’t need to have his name brought to readers’ […]
An introductory guest post at Beauty is a Sleeping Cat November is German Literature Month and there has already been a lot going on at blogs such as Beauty is a Sleeping Cat. The first part of my own contribution went up as a guest post on that excellent blog as an introduction to the […]
“Why don’t you all f-fade away And don’t try to dig what we all s-s-say I’m not trying to cause a big s-s-sensation I’m just talkin’ ’bout my g-g-g-generation” – The Who, “My Generation” n+1 magazine has an assessment of the influence of critical theory on American novelists who came of age in the 80s, […]
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