“Applause to the mosquito – its blood-gorged pitch, Its trembling shadow, threaten the hunter with Rapture and prick of sorrow, once the battle is done And your combatant’s bitten the dust, filled with you.” From one of the three poems by Polina Barskova in B O D Y translated from the Russian by Alex Cigale. […]
An essay in B O D Y on the life of Hans Christian Andersen, a life as bizarre in many ways as anything the writer conjured up in his well-known stories. Here is Rudnicki on Andersen writing his autobiography, The Fairytales of my Life: “Only the title is honest– everything else is made up. He […]
Turkish writer Çiler İlhan won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2011 for her short story collection Exile and now the English translation by Ayşegül Deniz Toroser Ateş is being published Istros Books. Besides İlhan, B O D Y has published three other EU Prize for Literature winners: Montenegrin Ognjen Spahić, Serbian Jelena Lengold and […]
“Despite the disasters and misfortunes of our age, one of the pleasures life has given me has been witnessing the appearance of four or five Mexican poets and writers. One of them is Salvador Elizondo.” – Octavio Paz Published in 1965, Salvador Elizondo’s Farabeuf ran counter to the magical realism of Latin American fiction and […]
Albanian writer Ismail Kadare has been announced as the winner of this year’s Jerusalem Prize, which he will be awarded at the Jerusalem International Book Fair on Feb. 8. The prize is given to writers dealing with the theme of human freedom in society and was inaguarated in 1963 with Bertrand Russell the first winner. […]
The Literary Saloon pointed my attention to a profile of Hispabooks in El Pais’s Trans-Iberian. The Madrid-based publisher has already put out a fantastic selection of new Spanish writers, including the award-winning Marcos Giralt Torrente’s Paris, which was excerpted in B O D Y earlier this year. Unfortunately, the article brings in the tired “read […]
This is the third and last story from Sándor Jászberényi Week in B O D Y and it takes place in Gaza under the benevolent watch of Hamas and the friendly border guards (among other kind souls). It’s called “Somewhere On The Border” and like the others was translated from the Hungarian by M. Henderson […]
The second of three stories being published in B O D Y this week from Hungarian writer Sándor Jászberényi takes place in a refugee camp on the Sudanese frontier. Read “The Majestic Clouds”, then go and read the book’s title story published yesterday (if you haven’t already) and then follow the links and read the […]
All this week B O D Y will be presenting the writing and photography of Sándor Jászberényi, whose short story collection The Devil is a Black Dog is coming out December 9 in an English translation by M. Henderson Ellis courtesy of New Europe Books. Today’s selection is the book’s title story, a chilling piece […]
The latest issue of Words Without Borders is out and is devoted to Contemporary Czech prose. Edited and with an introductory essay by translator Alex Zucker, the issue includes writers who are likely little to totally unknown even to readers keeping up with contemporary European fiction. In his essay Zucker pushes at the political straitjacket […]
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