“Under communism the basic building material was greyness. That’s what we all remember. Even those of us who have forgotten everything else. Communism was grey – this truism has poisoned our minds. And so, after our heroic liberation, our first reaction was to rush to a paint shop. And that’s what my country looks like […]
My article on the recent Švankmajer exhibition in Prague has just been published in New Eastern Europe magazine’s Spring 2013 issue. “The Last of the Great Surrealists: Jan Švankmajer: Dimensions of Dialogue – Between Film and Fine Art” is about the Czech artist and filmmaker’s extremely diverse art and film work as well as his […]
“Shadow Play” by Slovak writer Peter Karpinský is the first story I brought to Prague literary journal B O D Y as a new contributing editor. The story of a translator of a German poet that reveals itself to be much more than that, is part of Karpinský’s 2010 Anasoft-nominated collection The Holy Non-Assumption. The […]
In a world where overhyped English-language books playing on a predictable single-note formula (take your pick – 1. Quirky, 2. Topical, 3. Autobiographical) all too often overshadow masterpieces by writers from the wider world, it’s clear that international literature needs its champions. And champions it has, though not that many, and maybe not any who […]
The two novellas and five short stories that make up The Bridge Over the Neroch: And Other Works comprise the rest of the writing left to us by the author of Summer in Baden-Baden, Leonid Tsypkin. New Directions is bringing the book out in February 2013 and you can read my review in the 2nd […]
The latest issue of Absinthe: New European Writing is out including my essay “Rainer Werner Fassbinder: the Balzac of West Germany”. Commemorating the 30th anniversary of Fassbinder’s death at 37 years old I spoke with filmmaker Tom Kalin and president of the Fassbinder Foundation and his former editor Juliane Lorenz about the prolific filmmaker’s legacy […]
The new issue of The Critical Flame has a pair of reviews devoted to a new translation of the selected poetry of Osip Mandelstam, Stolen Air, by Christian Wiman and Ilya Kaminsky. Editor Daniel E. Pritchard pens a brief essay on the unusual practice of running two reviews of the same book. Then there’s Henry […]
There is something as poetic as it is sad that one of the great Russian-Jewish writers of the latter half of the 20th century worked as a pathologist (worked, that is, until the powers that be demoted and eventually fired him). The New Yorker has a very short story by the magnificent author of Summer […]
From Absinthe: “Absinthe 18 is coming soon and it’s full of exceptional art & writing from Europe, including a short play by Vlad Zografi, and poetry & prose by Marie-Claire Bancquart, Nichita Stanescu, Pia Tafdrup, Sladjan Lipovec, Marco Candida, Kristina Lugn, Hernan Migoya, Marko Pogacar, Iulian Ciocan, Jose Corredor-Matheos, Kamil Bouska, Jiri Brynda, and a […]
The latest Words Without Borders is out: Writing from the Silk Road, featuring fiction, poetry and non-fiction from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Xinjiang, China. Half of the work was actually written in Russian while the other three pieces were translated from Uzbek, Georgian and Uyghur. Exiled Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov, who has a poem […]
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