“In the narrow corridors and dark rooms of the once-elegant Hotel Dobray in the sleepy town of Sóbota, in a forgotten land wedged between Hungary and Yugoslavia, human destinies collide like the billiard balls in the hotel’s casino…” So reads the opening to the publisher’s description of Dušan Šarotar’s haunting Billiards at the Hotel Dobray, translated […]
The author of Snow White and Russian Red has a new novel coming out in English translation courtesy of Deep Vellum Publishing and translator Benjamin Paloff. Titled Honey, I Killed The Cats, Dorota Masłowska’s shreds modern-day consumer capitalist (etc.) life from its opening pages and you can read its first two chapters in Saturday European […]
Written in 1980, Dogs and Others, by Serbian writer Biljana Jovanović and translated into English by John K. Cox, shows life in 1960’s socialist Belgrade through a very particular yet representative family. Madness, suicide and the first openly lesbian character in the country’s literature are just part of the bohemian milieu and experimental writing. Read […]
“I would have forgotten this story if, about a year later, I hadn’t read a newspaper report about a lorry apprehended by the customs police in Vyšné Nemecké, at the border crossing between Slovakia and Ukraine. It is a place where customs officers frequently come across lorries that carry cheap, Chinese-made copies of branded clothes […]
The world lost a major writer when Daša Drndić passed away earlier this year. The author of Trieste, Belladonna and Leica Format, all available in English translation, is still seeing her work coming out in English with the soon-to-be-published Doppelgänger coming out from Istros Books in a translation by Celia Hawkesworth and Susan Curtis. Read […]
For the second time an excerpt a novel of one of the pre-eminent Slovak writers, Pavel Vilikovský, has appeared in B O D Y’s Saturday European Fiction, with this excerpt from Fleeting Snow, published by Istros Books in a translation by Julia and Peter Sherwood. This will be the first work published by Vilikovský in […]
Part of Éva Péterfy-Novák’s story of love, deception and betrayal, “Moscow”, was featured in B O D Y’s Hungarian Fiction Week recently and now you can read the second part – “Moscow II” – meaning, lots more deception and betrayal without the love. If you haven’t read the first part, then do that before you […]
“So what happened to Uncle Ivan and Aunt Eva?” “I didn’t find out about that until later, from my parents. The house had burned to the ground that night. Their burnt bodies were found in the ashes.” “And had they been,” I hesitated before saying the word, “murdered?” – from Places That Are Not on […]
“Of all things, I am most likely an epicurean. ‘Death has no bearing on us,’ Epicurus had said, “For when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we no longer exist.” And that is, roughly speaking, also my attitude toward ‘non-existence’ (to use the euphemistic philosophical term). But, when […]
“The writer bought a literary magazine, leafed through it, and was gratified: he hadn’t submitted anything and none of his work had been published. A few weeks later the annual nominations for the national literary prize were announced: to his relief, he wasn’t nominated…” So begins Balla’s short story “Paper Planes“, translated from the Slovak […]
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