“The place where the executions took place was right under the ramparts of the castle of Matthew III Csák of Trenčín. The condemned were hanged, beheaded, caned, broken on a wheel, quartered, and witches were burned – he was learning the art of torture.” – from “Signs“, which is an excerpt from Dušan Mitana’s final, posthumously […]
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The Night Circus | Review | CE Short Story Issue
“The collection’s cast of characters includes, among others, a child-like dwarf creature who needs to be kept away from water and serves as a litmus paper in the human world, an ex-stripper ceaselessly emitting cigar smoke in emulation of her act of long ago and an old woman whose devoted tending of the apricot tree […]
Richard Pupala in CE Short Story Issue
“There was a time, long, long ago now, when Michal used to be scared of him. Once he was startled awake in the middle of a hot summer’s night, to find his little brother sitting on his bed, motionless, a dark silhouette. Although he couldn’t see his face, he knew that the little one was […]
Zoran Feric in CE Short Story Issue
The Central European Short Story Issue kicks off its second week with a short story that harks back to Prague’s more fun and disreputable days of the early 90s. “That afternoon he took a taxi ride, bought a second-hand violin on the street of Alchemists, visited museums, had lunch and drank the best Austrian wine, […]
Anna Bolava in CE Short Story Issue
“I didn’t shine a light there. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bring myself to. I only heard it. You and your friends. I started to see why you were thinking like an insect in the last days. I wasn’t disturbing you. I let the flies and worms and maybe even the rats continue on. […]
Central European Short Story Issue
To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the fall of various walls and a curtain, B O D Y editors Jan Zikmund and myself are publishing short stories from liberated but hardly problem-liberated Central Europe. It begins with an introduction, as most things do. There will also be some reviews of short story collections to give […]
Adam Bodor in CE Short Story Issue
B O D Y’s Central European Short Story Issue kicks off today with “Rebi“, a chilling short story by Transylvanian-born Hungarian writer Ádám Bodor in a translation by Peter Sherwood. Bodor’s novel The Sinistra Zone was published by New Directions in a translation by Paul Olchváry. His novel The Birds of Verhovina, translated by Peter […]
Siegfried Mortkowitz in B O D Y
“And so, with the Holocaust deeply entrenched in my genes, I masturbated every chance I got.” The combination that fuels Siegfried Mortkowitz’s essay in B O D Y “Sex and the Holocaust“, an account not only of his prolific masturbatory career but of his search for his pleasure hunger in his parents experience of the […]
Slovak Lit in the UK
With the anniversary of the events of 1989 upon us there will be a series of events revolving around contemporary Slovak writing taking place in the UK. Presented under the banner ‘Raising the Velvet Curtain:A journey through contemporary SLOVAK arts’ a series of writers and publications will be presented by translator Julia Sherwood as well […]
Dusan Sarotar in B O D Y
“In the narrow corridors and dark rooms of the once-elegant Hotel Dobray in the sleepy town of Sóbota, in a forgotten land wedged between Hungary and Yugoslavia, human destinies collide like the billiard balls in the hotel’s casino…” So reads the opening to the publisher’s description of Dušan Šarotar’s haunting Billiards at the Hotel Dobray, translated […]
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