“The effort of saying more than two sentences seemed to exhaust him. I was tempted to conclude he was one of those people who don’t have the vocabulary to talk about their emotions, the kind of person who doesn’t know how to express, let alone discuss his feelings with a stranger.” From an excerpt from […]
“But at the same time he felt sad, because his age was getting the better of some of his abilities, and revitalizing some of those he’d already lost, even at the pace his great talent would allow was, nevertheless, not part of his plans as a serial killer.” From “The Serial Killer”, the first publication […]
“Better still if I begin with the heart of the matter. That we are poets, and that life has already maimed us quite a bit. At the hearing, I will say what I had told my boss while he was writing my last check: ‘When you read biographies of the greats, you come across mention […]
In 1999 Marcos Giralt Torrente’s novel Paris was the unanimous selection for Spain’s XVII Premio Herralde de Novela by a jury consisting of Roberto Bolaño, Salvador Clotas, Juan Cueto, Ester Tusquets, and the publisher Jorge Herralde. Last week Giralt Torrente won Italy’s prestigious book prize, the Premio Strega Europeo, for his third novel Tiempo de […]
“Here, paradise. There, at home, the law. The woman on the steps is around forty-five years old and J knows her, any time you pass by she’s sure to be standing there; the window panes are painted red so no one can see in, and in the doorway there’s a yellowed poster with a woman […]
Do you ever stay awake nights wondering how to keep your finger on the pulse of contemporary fiction? Of course you do. Well, the answer is actually very simple – read B O D Y’s Saturday European Fiction. For example, The Guardian has a laudatory review of last week’s excerpted novel The Blue Room by […]
As the Knausgaard phenomenon puts contemporary Norwegian writing on the map of the English-speaking world (a map full of blank spaces, it must be said), or on the other hand, as it localizes that literature into a single name – (I could imagine the introductions between an up-and-coming Norwegian writer and an up-and-coming Chilean writer: […]
From the time I read “The Sorrows of Idiot Augustus” in Best European Fiction 2012 by Janusz Rudnicki, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft, I was on the lookout for anything by this fantastic writer that would breakthrough the sea of mediocrity of what gets published in English-language fiction. This turned out to be […]
“Upon passing the door to the master bathroom you make out a black reflection in the tub. You distract yourself by putting a bibelot face down in the children’s bedroom. Whispering death threats in the dolls’ ears in the playroom. You wind up climbing the stairs. Thirteen steps you’ve counted now, thirteen, that lead you […]
“I sat down on the edge of the couch. The Radiotechnika radiola was playing music, something non-Russian. Vova poured the rest of the wine into the glasses – there turned out to be just a bit left — and they drank up. I was sorry Igor had interfered, and that they didn’t give me any […]
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