“On the windowsill lay the manuscript, a rectangular-shaped embodiment of her guilty conscience. The languishing strength of the early winter sun sent a shudder down Nóra’s spine. Her attempt at making an airplane resulted in a hat.” – from “Chinese Snow” by Miklós Vámos, translated from Hungarian by Ági Bori. Read more of the Spring […]
‘You’ll be much more at ease! You’ll be a more interesting person,’ she said about my recent breakup. For a few months I didn’t sleep well. Budapest might be the town with the most ambulances and fire trucks flying by. It must be the most unfortunate metropolis in Europe. Every single siren woke me up. […]
Many people think of the earliest science-fiction as being exclusively British and French, but in fact a couple books about to be published by Jantar Press show that this is far from true. The Science of the Stars by Gustáv Reuss and Newton’s Brain by Jakub Arbes are two early sci-fi books from Slovakia and […]
“When I looked up again, I could see only that my father was stuffing the doll, leg first, into the stove, after the rags. You could see how these caught fire amid the orange glow of the embers, the doll taking only seconds to shrivel up into something unrecognisable, though the rags flopped about as […]
“I was born a feral beast. At the time of my birth, I tore my mother apart. It wasn’t on purpose. I think the circumstances caused it. There was a lot of blood in the hospital room. My father, who gutted animals as part of his occupation, couldn’t bear to look.” – from “A Western […]
“We had stopped here and there along the way—at important spots, where he had seen a deer for the first time or where he’d had his first kiss. So I didn’t get to see the landscape while it was still light, and now only saw it as elongated shadows that the hills were casting over […]
“Reaching this point, Rabbi Nachman felt the urge to make a pause, not even he knew why, and lifting his eyes from the book, he saw on the threshold of the open door the tall thin figure of the wayfarer with the tangled white beard, the clear blue eyes sunken in their sockets, the long […]
B O D Y’s latest issue kicks off today and will bring new fiction, poetry, essays and interviews through the month of April. For my part, I will be publishing fiction from Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania with work by Ludovic Bruckstein, Krisztina Tóth, Sándor Jászberényi and Leonie Hodkevitch. The opening work in the issue is […]
“An old Portuguese man steps out of a dream about the southand leans against a yellow wall.I would like to be his gaze, which measures the distancebetween the sun, the tourists’ white thighs and the blue tiles of the cathedral.” from “Uno”, one of two poems by Anna Belkovska in translation by Jayde Will that […]
‘But then a grenade exploded, and they were showered with plaster and shards of bricks. Greta covered Hans with her naked body. But he clambered up onto his lone leg and made for the window. Greta tried to hold him back, what could you possibly want to see, my love?’ from “Victory” by Jānis Joņevs, […]
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