Michael Scammell came to the Prague book fair with two seemingly related tasks – to speak about his biography of Arthur Koestler, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth Century Skeptic, and to participate in a panel on Index on Censorship, of which he was the founding editor. And while issues of censorship […]
Czech novelist Petra Hůlová (b. 1979) vaulted to fame almost a decade ago with the publication of her debut novel All of This Belongs to Me (Paměť mojí babičce, 2002). Since then she has written five more novels in Czech and in 2009 saw her much acclaimed first novel published by Northwestern University Press in […]
For many authors the acronym MFA refers to the Master of Fine Arts programs in writing that are currently so popular in the US, and that some critics argue create a stifling uniformity among aspiring scribes. For Tomáš Kafka, MFA instead refers to his employer, the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As the current Czech […]
Designing book jackets requires a certain amount of humility and acceptance that your work will be enjoyed without most people acknowledging the time and effort you put into it, or ever associating the book with your name. On the other hand who else is there who can boast of having collaborated with the likes of […]
One of the most striking stories in the Slovak fiction issue of Dalkey Archive Press 2010 Review of Contemporary Fiction was Uršula Kovalyk’s “Mrs. Agnes’s Bathroom,” a story of an ordinary old woman’s descent or release into an unreal tropical dream world that just happens to appear in her bathroom one night. A poet, fiction […]
Michal Hvorecký was among the Slovak writers included in the Slovak issue of the Dalkey Archive Press’ Review of Contemporary Fiction. Born in 1976 he is part of a younger generation of writers expanding the bounds of Slovak writing and gaining a growing international readership, though at this point far more in German translation than […]
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