Avrom (Abraham) Sutzkever is known for his powerful, lyrical poetry dealing with the Holocaust that he fought through as a partisan and survived as well other weighty, intense themes in his long life’s body of work. And while this short story has its share of darkness, I think it presents a different side of the […]
“The moon has gone down, disappeared somewhere; the stars are now a pale yellow colour and fast fading, all the merriment having gone from them. Dew is falling as Ester carries the milk pail, says czokolom, thank you, in their language and tries to squeeze past the old woman on her way out. But the […]
“It all began with a rather unusual encounter in a first-class compartment of the Belgrade-Skopje express train.” So begins Aleksandar Prokopiev’s short story “Papradishki” translated from the Macedonian by Will Firth. But from the beginning, which could be the opening chapter of a detective novel with references to Hercule Poirot and Maigret, the story enters […]
Daniela Hodrová began writing A Kingdom of Souls in 1977 but the book, like the rest of her work, didn’t appear until after the fall of the communist regime in 1991. In 2012, Hodrová was awarded the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize, which had previously been awarded to the likes of Philip Roth, Haruki Murakami and […]
Hana Andronikova’s novel of a family odyssey beginning in prewar Czechoslovakia and ending up in modern-day North America, with stops in the by turns exotic and horrifying locales of India and Auschwitz won the Czech Magnesia Litera Award in 2002. Now The Sound of the Sundial is finally appearing in English translation edited and adapted […]
B O D Y’s series of European fiction in translation, Saturday European Fiction, has now reached the end of its second year and so a summing up of sorts is in order. While the vast majority of writers published come from Central and Eastern Europe, year two has seen the geographical range expand a bit […]
Seven Days to the Funeral is a lightly fictionalized memoir left unfinished at the death of the Slovak journalist, critic and translator Ján Rozner, who had emigrated to Germany in 1976. Yet it is also much more than that – it is a document of the process of normalization in Slovakia following the Soviet invasion […]
Joris-Karl Huysmans is best known for the representative novel of Decadence, À rebours (Against Nature), and its extreme aesthete protagonist Des Essientes as well as his masterpiece of Satanism, Là-Bas (Down There). But his prolific output included a great variety of no less extreme works, including the newly translated Un Dilemme (A Dilemma). The short […]
Croatian writer Ivan Sršen’s debut novel Harmattan follows a Nigerian woman imprisoned in Germany for nothing more than entering Europe without the proper documents. Read an excerpt of the account of prison life in Saturday European Fiction in a translation by Marino Buble. Read more Saturday European Fiction
In 1923 the 40 year-old Franz Kafka met the 25 year-old Dora Diamant at a Jewish vacation camp on the Baltic Sea. They fell in love and decided to move together to Berlin, though Kafka was already suffering from the tuberculosis that would kill him less than a year later. Read an excerpt from Michael […]
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