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Alexandra Berkova in B O D Y

“…and he coughs decorously and goes off decorously to his study. Where he decorously. Straightens. Some papers. Slowly. Carefully. Tap-ping them. To cut off the edges. It’s very important now. To the millimeter exactly. At the edge of the table. And we’re each of us alone again… Ah, yes: childhood! Land of terror…” From Alexandra […]

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Mirka Szychowiak in B O D Y

“Come, precious ones, let’s cry together before I go. I will be back with you as soon as I can. No, I won’t stay; they don’t want me here anymore. Władzia, dear, keep the peace, won’t you? Don’t let anybody hit Zosia. And please don’t fight amongst yourselves. I will miss you too…” From the […]

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Marie Sizun in B O D Y

Another work of French writing in Saturday European Fiction with the debut of Marie Sizun in English as her novel Her Father’s Daughter is about to be published by Peirine Press in a translation by Adriana Hunter. Marie Sizun wrote her first novel at 65 years old and has gone on to publish seven more […]

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Jean-Luc Godard in B O D Y

  “…then the day when I will have seen the world once again robust held fast like the two parts of a belt buckle the word Russia and the word happiness I will really be ready to die…” From Phrases: Six Films by Jean-Luc Godard, translated from the French by Stuart Kendall. The book, to […]

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Josef Jedlicka in B O D Y

Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life by Josef Jedlička, written between 1954 and 1957, might seem, on the surface, like a novel an English-language reader has some experience of. After all, Kundera and Hrabal have written of the Stalinist 50s – (Hrabal-readers most recently being granted access to his short stories from the 50s […]

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Faruk Sehic in B O D Y

“I killed several individual enemies in hand-to-hand combat, so now my fellow townspeople avoid me, and when I walk down the street everyone crosses to the other side. I can just smell their fear. It reeks of loathing, of Hegel and Kant, of the universal sense of human life and of so-called human kindness; all […]

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Mirka Szychowiak in B O D Y

“Kitchen full of black aunties sighed, outraged with Grandma’s lack of respect for the written word and the bloody stamp in the corner of the page. Nobody questioned the war death. She was the only one who put her foot down.” From the short story “Tola” by poet and short story writer Mirka Szychowiak, translated […]

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Lukas Luk in B O D Y

Lukáš Luk’s novel Honey Thieves will be out in Slovak shortly but B O D Y has already brought you a short excerpt from this story of two brothers who gather honey in the forests of the newly Christian Kingdom of Hungary. It was translated from the Slovak by Magdalena Mullek. Read more Saturday European […]

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Jan Balaban in B O D Y

The first week of B O D Y’s month-long Czech issue was finished off with a powerful short story, “Cedar and Hammer”, by the award winning writer Jan Balabán, whose literary output is all the more impressive considering he died at the age of 49. There is next to nothing of Balabán’s work available in […]

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Rut Hillarp in B O D Y

One of Sweden’s great modernists poet and writer Rut Hillarp’s work has never before appeared in English before now. With The Black Curve about to be published by Readux Books in a translation by Saskia Vogel, B O D Y has published an excerpt in Saturday European Fiction. Read translator Saskia Vogel on how she […]

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