It isn’t only our own time filled with war and conflict. As the anniversary of the joyful and welcomed (by many) beginning of World War I is upon us, The New York Review of Books is republishing a recently discovered memoir of the war by Béla Zombory-Moldován entitled The Burning of the World in a […]
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Literary roundup: Books, borders and bullets
We recently linked to a Culture.pl article on Polish émigré writers, of which, there were many. Now they have followed up with an article on the likewise numerous books written in Poland that weren’t written in Polish. And these aren’t minor works written by expats but were a significant part of the country’s cultural life. […]
Literary roundup: Ukrainian parallels and Hungarian translation
In n+1 Sophie Pinkham parallels Ukraine today and through the eyes of the great but largely unknown Kyiv-raised Russian writer Konstantin Paustovsky, when, for a time certainly, the country was even more messed up than it is now, if you can believe it. There are lot of terrifying, depressing, interesting and surreal facets to the […]
Katia Kapovich in B O D Y
“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 […]
Literary roundup: New Asymptote and Polish émigré writers
The latest issue of Asymptote is out with an awesome Latin America Fiction Feature, including work by Sergio Chejfec, Cristina Peri Rossi, Lina Meruane and Julián Herbert as well as an essay by César Aira on Osvaldo Lamborghini. The esteemed translators bringing this work into English include many who have worked with B O D […]
Marcos Giralt Torrente in B O D Y
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 […]
Literary Roundup: The dangers of books+alcohol
In an age when we are being bombarded by articles about the end of reading and how today’s uncultivated youth only play violent video games, surf the web, mindlessly tap on the iPads and do other things that I can’t even identify it’s positively heartening to read something that starts off like this: “It would […]
New and Novel
A Brezhnev era satire of Soviet repression, a book of short stories revolving around the siege of Sarajevo and poems from “Perhaps the most famous Russian poet of the twentieth century. ” In other words, beach reading. Poems of Osip Mandelstam Peter France writes in his foreword: “I have always been conscious that Mandelstam was an […]
Andreas Maier in B O D Y
“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 […]
New and Novel
A lot of early 20th century Moscow, Paris (through Russian eyes) and Berlin this week, though also some interstellar travel, 21st century Berlin and more. Black Snow by Mikhail Bulgakov After being saved from a suicide attempt by the appearance of a literary editor, the journalist and failed novelist Sergei Maxudov has a book suddenly […]
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