There are some new magazines out with Central European content. Two Lines: Passageways has Julia Sherwood’s translation of an extract from Slovak writer Ján Rozner’s Seven Days to the Funeral as well as a fantastic selection of Russian poets such as Arseny Tarkovsky (the filmmaker’s father), Velmir Khlebnikov and contemporary Shamshad Abdullaev. To read a […]
Ruth Franklin has an excellent article on Gombrowicz at The New Yorker (subscription required), placing the new translation of his diaries in a context that provides the requisite history without weighing the reader down (as most critics seem to) with the obligatory yet incomprehensible need to go on and on about his Polishness the way […]
At Requited, Daniel Green writes a very interesting review of We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love and Literature at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. While definitely not being one of those MFA assassination pieces that have triggered such hot debate (I know that’s an exaggeration, but that’s how they’ve been referred and responded to) he […]
B O D Y A new Prague-based international literary magazine has just come out. B O D Y is run by editors Joshua Mensch, Christopher Crawford, Stephan Delbos and contains a selection of poetry, fiction and an essay on three neglected American women poets from the early 20th century by poet, writer and translator Richard […]
Just discovered an excellent site devoted to Croatian writers – Critical Mass (Kritična masa) – is available in Croatian, English and German versions, and features both well-known and (for me at least) much lesser-known writers. There are author pages for Daša Drndić, whose novel Trieste was recently published in English and which I’ll have a […]
Being a good or great writer is certainly no guarantee of having a great, good or even remedial grasp of politics, culture or, really, anything at all. Yet there are writers whose intellect outside their books approximates their intellect in their books, and so it can be worth hearing what they have to say. For […]
Read Russia I just discovered the Read Russia 2012 site which has everything from video interviews with Olga Slavnikova, Boris Akunin and other well-known writers to a timeline with information on a range of Russian writers – from Andrei Gelasimov, whose Thirst I highly recommend, to some writers who look young enough to be my […]
The all-Bulgarian issue of Absinthe will be published in early May. The issue (#17) features writing by Georgi Gospodinov, Milen Ruskov, Emilia Dvoryanova, Vladislav Todorov, Krassimir Damianov, Kristin Dimitrova, Virginia Zaharieva, Vladimir Zarev, Yanitza Radeva, Ivan Dimitrov, Theodora Dimova, Zdravka Evtimova, Dimiter Kenarov, Maria Doneva, Niki Boikov and Stefan Ivanov. There will also be an eight page portfolio of […]
An article on Aleksandar Hemon and Nicole Krauss presenting Dalkey’s Best European Fiction 2012, on the good old translation conundrum, on old men no longer reading fiction (from a very good source) and another kind of cut in the publishing industry besides job cuts. Read the full article at Czech Position
In Eurozine, Slavenka Drakulić has a far-reaching exploration of European identity by looking at two very different forms of change taking place in Italy. On the one hand, there is the influx of refugee immigrants coming to the island of Lampedusa and the southern coastal city of Bari. It is a story of incredible privations […]
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