Istros Books has a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to translate and publish Under Pressure, a short story collection by war veteran and writer, Faruk Šehić. Šehić’s debut novel, Quiet Flows the Una, published in Will Firth’s English translation by Istros, won the 2013 EU Prize for Literature. The book was first published in Bosnian […]
Way back in 2013 when the world wasn’t utterly collapsing I had the foresight to publish an excerpt from Balla’s novella In the Name Of the Father, translated from the Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood. Now the book has been published by Jantar Publishing and translator Charles Sabatos has written about it in the […]
In Part I of my interview with Haute Culture Books’ Luis de Miranda the writer and publisher spoke about the uniqueness of his publishing venture. Here the focus is on the books themselves, particularly The Sublimes by Yuri Mamleyev and Flaubert’s Felicity, translated by De Miranda and available as a free download here. Literalab: How […]
In a publishing world where carving out a unique niche, not to mention publishing unique books, might appear to be increasingly difficult, Haute Culture Books has come along and done just that. With a fascinating selection of fiction that are offerred as exceptional art objects publisher Luis de Miranda is charting a very different course […]
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 […]
Russian writer Dmitri Novoselov recently had his English-language debut in B O D Y with the short story “Alevtina”. Now, with the release of the September 2013 Black Markets issue of Words Without Borders he has another work looking back at the chaotic and often absurd decade in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet […]
“The mist that came from the Mediterranean sea blotted out the city that Pilate so detested. The suspension bridges connecting the temple with the grim fortress of Antonia vanished, the murk descended from the sky and drowned the winged gods above the hippodrome, the crenellated Hasmonaean palace, the bazaars, the caravanserai, the alleyways, the pools […]
Helen Epstein was not even a year old in the summer of 1948 when her father decided to take his family away from Czechoslovakia for a new life in the US. Having survived the Nazi concentration camps, he was unwilling to endure life under communism. Growing up in New York’s Czech émigré community, Epstein retained […]
At various times since the fall of the Iron Curtain there have been outbreaks of fear that hordes of criminals would cross the Czech, Polish, Slovak, Slovene and Hungarian borders to pillage the wealth of Western Europe. In 2012, it looks as if this long awaited crime wave is actually coming to pass, though in […]
Polish writer Bruno Schulz continues to gain some of the acknowledgement he failed to obtain during his tragically shortened life. Earlier this month a festival devoted to Schulz took place in Lublin in Eastern Poland, not far from his native Drohobycz (today Drohobych, Ukraine). The festival is called Bruno4ever, a title which, if Schulz were […]
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