“Yet it may be that they can’t see a thing, even their own darkness. So what, Ionesco, did you turn out to be different from everyone else? Or maybe you’re not Ionesco at all, even? These words seemed very unusual to Ionesco. Not even simply strange, but entirely extraordinary.” From “Ionesco and Feodasi” in Moldovan […]
“Your Honor. You hear our stories. You record them. They touch your mind. They touch your intelligence. Perhaps even your imagination. But you’re not one inch closer to us than you were before the trial. Nothing in the world can bridge the gap between your imagination and our experiences.” From Monika Held’s This Place Holds […]
“If she could only hide somewhere now, like a small animal in a hole. She remembered the day she decided she wouldn’t play anymore. She had her hands over her belly, as she tried to protect the baby while he hit her. The famous and world-renowned composer. If she’d only dared to open her mouth. […]
“Beginning in reverie and a nostalgic glance back at the protagonist’s early life and dreams, Jana Juráňová’s Ilona. My Life with the Bard subtly shifts to a tone of gentle and increasingly piercing irony towards Slovakia’s national poet, with moments of almost nightmarish confinement, as it becomes clear that there was a heartlessness at the […]
“The stout man looked at Israel for the first time since he’d walked into the restaurant. He placed his glass on the table and said, ‘You should go away. You aren’t suited for this country and you don’t like it. Dov loves it. Too bad he’ll come to such a stupid end.’ He gazed into […]
“– Do you intend to kill someone? – the woman asked. – Quite the opposite. It’s more likely it will be me. – You have nothing to fear. You still have…. And she named a date, hidden in the depths of the next century, and which flooded me with its gust-like piercing chill, like a […]
The death of Rasputin at the hands of a British Secret Service agent – an excerpt a kaleidoscopic book of the First World War, The Great War by Aleksandar Gatalica, translated from the Serbian by Will Firth. Aleksandar Gatalica will be appearing in the UK for four appearances beginning 10th November: Monday, 10th November 18:30: […]
With the publication of the first volume of Hungarian writer Miklós Szentkuthy’s Prae coming up in December 2014 by Contra Mundum Press you can read an excerpt from the work that publisher Rainer Hanshe writes in an essay had Szentkuthy called a “monster” upon its initial publication in 1934 and which “essentially inaugurated the Hungarian […]
“‘It seems like you’re an unhappy person. Isn’t that true? Learn to be happy in your unhappiness like Alyosha Karamazov,’ says the lunatic. Alyosha Karamazov? Shit, who’s that? His scar-faced accomplice from the Russian mafia?” From Ondrej Štefánik’s short story “Man On A Toilet”, translated from the Slovak by Janet Livingstone. This is the second […]
This week’s Saturday European Fiction is a short story by the author of Coming from an Off-Key Time and Miruna, a Tale, to mention just his books translated into English – “Greetings From Prague” by Bogdan Suceavă and translated from the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth (as were the two abovementioned novels). Tycho Brahe, Kepler, […]
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