The Calvert Journal has compiled a list of 100 books to read from Eastern Europe (also Central Europe) and Central Asia. It’s a fascinating list put together by a wide range of writers, translators, academics coming from a number of different countries and languages besides English. The list includes a number of books and writers […]
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The Flight of Icarus – in Phantom Drift
“How far do you have to go to be free of the threat of imprisonment? Up in the air, the idea of confinement suddenly became nonsensical. There were no walls, nothing solid to keep you still. On the earth though, there were borders and barracks and armed guards…” From my short story “The Flight of […]
Literary roundup: WWB’s Young Russophonia + Rankov interview
Books From Slovakia has a fantastic interview Daniela Balážová held with Slovak writer Pavol Rankov, author of the recently translated It Happened on the First of September. Among many topics Rankov talks about how the different translations deal with all the different languages used in the novel (spoiler: differently) and also talks about the lost multicultural […]
Literary roundup: Balabán, Barnás and books
For their series “The Czech Books You Must Read”, Czech Radio has an interview with my B O D Y co-editor Jan Zikmund from the Czech Literary Centre on Jan Balabán, whose novel Where Was the Angel Going? was recently published by Glagoslav Publications in a translation by Charles S. Kraszewski. The same publisher/translator combo […]
Ludovic Bruckstein stories
For the occassion of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Istros Books is publishing Ludovic Bruckstein’s collection With an Unopened Umbrella in the Pouring Rain, translated from the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth. Bookanista has an excerpt from the novel here as well as a review of a pair of novellas published by Istros as The Trap. There […]
Nezval in B O D Y
I greet your gliding flight O wings of deathThose who resisted itHave purple facesHave bloodshot eyes like a withering grape leaf – from the latest offering in the Winter 2021 Issue of B O D Y is a poem titled “The Trapdoor”, excerpted from the 1936 work of poet Vítězslav Nezval, Woman in the Plural, […]
Death of the Artists: Marinetti’s Last Stand
Marinetti was both the Malcolm McLaren and Johnny Rotten of his era, the impresario and figurehead of what was early 20th century punk. He charmed his audience with shock and provocation, telling his Russian hosts that the Kremlin was an absurdity, Tolstoy hypocritical, Dostoevsky hysterical, responded to a question about Russian art by asking if […]
Magnetized | Review | Winter Issue
In 1982, Ricardo Luis Melogno murdered four taxi drivers in the space of a week in Buenos Aires. He has been locked up in prison or psychiatric institutions ever since, and now is cast in a legal limbo from which he may never be released. Argentine writer Carlos Busqued, whose debut novel Under This Terrible […]
Rankov in B O D Y: Winter Issue
After they finished the rosary, their mother made her usual plea: “Dear God, please bring Karcsi home safely from the war.” “Amen,” Péter and his father said. “No,” Karcsi said, “I don’t want to come home. Instead you should pray that I live a less depraved life in hell than I have in this world.” […]
Pavol Rankov wins 14th Prix du livre européen
The fourteenth Prix du livre européen has been awarded to Slovak writer Pavol Rankov for his novel It Happened on the First of September with a prize of €10,000 to be presented in a ceremony in February 2021. The novel was published in a French translation in 2019, while its English translation by Magdalena Mullek […]
