Part I – On Best European Fiction 2011 and the Euro-American debate over literary adventurousness The publication of the inaugural Best European Fiction collection by Dalkey Archive Press in 2010 resulted in a bit of American literary defensiveness over claims that European fiction was more adventurous and experimental than its new world counterpart. Zadie Smith’s […]
I like writers’ festivals – not when the writers read their work, which is usually boring, or when the discussions are overly organized, in which case they can be dull too. The most interesting aspects of writers’ festivals are the moments that typically slip through the cracks, that you have to see in person to […]
A response to Tao Lin’s article in the New York Observer. Every so often the “Novel” is brought out on the stage of a newspaper, magazine or manifesto like a patient aboutto go under the knife in an operating theater. “Does the Novel Have a Future?” reads the headline of Taiwanese-American writer Tao Lin’s latest […]
The 20th century is often justifiably referred to as a bloodbath. The 21st century is bloody too, but might more accurately be described as a bubble bath. It was ushered in following the bursting of the dot-com bubble, and since then has experienced a housing bubble, a commodities bubble and almost every kind of financial, […]
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 […]
Central European literary life A recurring obstacle to writing about Central European literature is the fact that it apparently doesn’t exist. As recently as this year, when Penguin UK brought out its series of Central European Classics, British novelist Adam Thirlwell began his overview of the collection by writing “I can put it like this. […]
literalab 