Link: The New Inquiry: Un(der)known Writers: Alberto Savinio thenewinquiry: Operatic Lives: “Isadora Duncan” (1942) In Nice it was raining. Apollo and Diana stood at the curb, covered by black raincoats. When the automobile went by, Diana grabbed the scarf fluttering behind Isadora’s neck with two fingers and held tight. This and nothing more. A moment […]
In the last years of his long life Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato was apparently kept from reading and writing by his doctors and instead devoted himself to painting. Sabato’s literary ties to Central European and Russian fiction are evident enough in his books, but in case you needed further proof …
Aleksandar Ristovic (1933-1994) is a Serbian poet whose sole book in English, Devil’s Lunch, was translated by Serbian-American poet Charles Simic and published in 1999. At Harriet, the blog of the Poetry Foundation poet Jeffrey McDaniel provides a mouth watering introduction to Ristovic’s work by taking readers through the title poem “Devil’s Lunch.” For more […]
Czech novelist Petra Hůlová (b. 1979) vaulted to fame almost a decade ago with the publication of her debut novel All of This Belongs to Me (Paměť mojí babičce, 2002). Since then she has written five more novels in Czech and in 2009 saw her much acclaimed first novel published by Northwestern University Press in […]
For many authors the acronym MFA refers to the Master of Fine Arts programs in writing that are currently so popular in the US, and that some critics argue create a stifling uniformity among aspiring scribes. For Tomáš Kafka, MFA instead refers to his employer, the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As the current Czech […]
The 20th century is often justifiably referred to as a bloodbath. The 21st century is bloody too, but might more accurately be described as a bubble bath. It was ushered in following the bursting of the dot-com bubble, and since then has experienced a housing bubble, a commodities bubble and almost every kind of financial, […]
One of the most striking stories in the Slovak fiction issue of Dalkey Archive Press 2010 Review of Contemporary Fiction was Uršula Kovalyk’s “Mrs. Agnes’s Bathroom,” a story of an ordinary old woman’s descent or release into an unreal tropical dream world that just happens to appear in her bathroom one night. A poet, fiction […]
The Balkanized readership of Ivo Andric For readers of Ivo Andric who are not from the Balkans, the Nobel Prize winning writer seems far from controversial. If anything, the author of The Bridge on the Drina may seem a somewhat old-fashioned novelist, a good and colorful storyteller, ] – hardly someone who deserves an assessment […]
Oxford’s Bodleian Library and the Marbach Literary Archive in Germany have prevented a collection of letters and postcards written by Kafka from being auctioned off and will soon be put on public display, switching between the two prestigious institutions like a child shuttling back and forth between divorced parents. I attended a meeting of Prague’s […]
Michal Hvorecký was among the Slovak writers included in the Slovak issue of the Dalkey Archive Press’ Review of Contemporary Fiction. Born in 1976 he is part of a younger generation of writers expanding the bounds of Slovak writing and gaining a growing international readership, though at this point far more in German translation than […]
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