From fairy tales retold with some irreverent twists, along with scenes from the Macedonian past, present and unreality to two very different worlds of implicit and explicit violence on either end of Soviet domination – one in Dagestan after the fall of communism, the other in newly occupied Prague in the 50s. Innocence; or, Murder […]
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2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund winners
PEN America has announced the recipients of this year’s PEN/Heim Translation Fund grants and there’s some great writing from Central and Eastern Europe in the works as well as from the rest of the world. First of all, B O D Y’s own Stephan Delbos along with Tereza Novická won for their translation of The […]
Book World Prague 2015
The Prague book fair is underway and I had to take refuge from the Friday crowds of schoolchildren in my local café, which, as it turns out, is crowded with slightly older schoolchildren trying to look even older through chain-smoking and midafternoon glasses of wine. Book World Prague 2015’s Guest of Honor is Egypt and […]
Richard Weiner in B O D Y
One of the great Czech modernists Richard Weiner has finally been translated into English, with the novel The Game For Real in a translation by Benjamin Paloff being published by Two Lines Press this week. Read an excerpt in B O D Y here Like Kafka, Weiner never lived to see his writing appreciated, this […]
European Literature Night 2015
Contemporary European literature will have a night in the spotlight in a multitude (75, as it turns out) of Czech and European cities on Wednesday, May 13, as public readings will be taking place from a wide variety of works and in an assortment of interesting locations for European Literature Night 2015. The project originated […]
New and Novel
Sometimes in the world of literature in translation when it rains it pours. So it is that on May 12th it will be pouring a fantastic new selection of books, including a Czech modernist in English for the first time, a surreal Czech novel written during Czechoslovakia’s normalization after the Soviet occupation and a Russian […]
Daniela Hodrova In B O D Y
Daniela Hodrová began writing A Kingdom of Souls in 1977 but the book, like the rest of her work, didn’t appear until after the fall of the communist regime in 1991. In 2012, Hodrová was awarded the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize, which had previously been awarded to the likes of Philip Roth, Haruki Murakami and […]
Polina Barskova in B O D Y
“Applause to the mosquito – its blood-gorged pitch, Its trembling shadow, threaten the hunter with Rapture and prick of sorrow, once the battle is done And your combatant’s bitten the dust, filled with you.” From one of the three poems by Polina Barskova in B O D Y translated from the Russian by Alex Cigale. […]
PEN World Voices Festival 2015
The PEN World Voices Festival kicks off in New York City today and though it’s already gotten quite a lot of unintentional publicity due to the protest against awarding Charlie Hebdo the PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Free Expression Courage Award there is a lot else of interest going on, with Africa being the main […]
Literary Roundup: New (Kundera) Yorker and Bulgarian writing
Milan Kundera’s first novel in 13 years, The Festival of Insignificance, will be published in Linda Asher’s English translation next month and the New Yorker has just published an excerpt, though it’s being promoted as a short story, “The Apologizer”. The novel was published in Italy in 2013 and then in France and Spain. Bulgarian […]
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