“when dad came out he had to push his way through a raging crowd of invalids everyone with a limp except me later he showed me some monuments but to me Warsaw was a city of people missing limbs” From “Warsaw”, one of four poems by Polish poet Piotr Macierzynski published in B O D […]
Asymptote’s third anniversary issue is out and, as always, is full of great fiction, poetry, and more than I can list here. Among the highlights are Michael Hofmann’s brilliant essay on Wolfgang Koeppen, a writer who is a thousand times better than most of the names presented as the greats of the second half of […]
At 2 Paragraphs there is a cool interview series in which international writers respond to a the following Tolstoy quote and follow-up question: “I know that my unity with all people cannot be destroyed by national boundaries.” Is a similar belief essential in your work? Or are cultural and national distinctions a critical component of […]
During my recent trip to Bratislava’s Bibliotéka book fair I was interviewed by the weekly cultural magazine of the daily Pravda. Here is a link to the interview, in Slovak translation naturally. All I can summarize from it is that they give some biographical details that I may or may not have made up (I […]
It’s all Czech poet Pavel Šrut all week in B O D Y, beginning with Monday’s essay by translator Deborah Garfinkle “Remembering Pavel Šrut’s Worm-Eaten Light” and continuing with her translations of his poetry and a review of his work. Worm-Eaten Light is the work Šrut published in 1969 following the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia […]
Paradises might be a reimagining of Camus’ Outsider – but in female form and living in 21st-century Buenos Aires. Our narrator allows the hazards of death and chance encounters to lead her through the city, where she sleepwalks into a job in the zoo’s reptile house, and another administering morphine to one of the oddball […]
A lot of the publishers of translated fiction have been weighing in recently on the state of affairs. Now publisher Stefan Tobler takes the occasion of his And Other Stories third anniversary to add his own assessment of the challenges of bringing out legitimately interesting, unique books in the English-speaking world, with its closed-minded philistinism […]
This doesn’t have anything to do with Central and Eastern European writing but I was very happy to publish an excerpt from Argentine writer Carlos Busqued’s debut novel Under This Terrible Sun in B O D Y and so am posting it here. It’s a truly phenomenal novel – dark but not gloomy, filled with […]
I recently had the pleasure of hearing Prague-based writer Thor Garcia read from his most recent novel Only Fools Die of Heartbreak. Now the Czech Literature Portal has an interview with Garcia in which he talks about the mythical early 90s, his journalism and writing, Czech culture and “drab” American fiction. Having just written about […]
Asymptote’s April 2013 issue has just come out and, as always, contains a lot of great prose, poetry and more, some of which comes from the part of the world written about hereabouts. The introduction of Hungarian writer Miklós Szentkuthy continues with an excerpt from Towards the One and Only Metaphor translated by Tim Wilkinson […]
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