Do you ever stay awake nights wondering how to keep your finger on the pulse of contemporary fiction? Of course you do. Well, the answer is actually very simple – read B O D Y’s Saturday European Fiction. For example, The Guardian has a laudatory review of last week’s excerpted novel The Blue Room by […]
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Arthur Eloesser in B O D Y
“The Berliner wants to be loved now too, and would gladly trade the familiar admiration of serious folk for the affections of the international idlers’ colony that seeks, in London and especially in Paris, a climate for pleasures high and low. I find this pandering and chasing after people undignified, and anyway it leads to […]
Literary roundup: Balkan Day, Kozlov and Hlasko
On June 13 the British Library is holding a seminar entitled “Balkan Day” with an absolutely fantastic lineup of Balkan writers that includes Dubravka Ugrešić, Vladislav Bajac, Igor Štiks, Andrej Nikolaidis, Muharem Bazdulj, Dragan Kujundžić, Christina Pribicevic-Zoric and Alex Drace-Francis. There will also be an event with Rosie Goldsmith “Balkanisation: the pick of recent Balkan […]
Hanne Orstavik in B O D Y
As the Knausgaard phenomenon puts contemporary Norwegian writing on the map of the English-speaking world (a map full of blank spaces, it must be said), or on the other hand, as it localizes that literature into a single name – (I could imagine the introductions between an up-and-coming Norwegian writer and an up-and-coming Chilean writer: […]
Literary roundup: Music, literature and blood
The growth of European crime writing from outside Scandinavia continues and on June 11 four crime writers from the other corners (and center, actually) of Europe will be in London at the London Review Bookshop to talk about their work and, of course, crime. The event is titled “More Bloody Foreigners: Criminally Good Books From […]
Jacek Gutorow in B O D Y
“So many poems. So many nice poems. More and more and still getting stronger.” This is from the begininng of Jacek Gutorow’s poem “Caedmon”, one of four of the Polish poet’s works published in B O D Y in translations by Piotr Florczyk.
Literary roundup: Lit in translation at BEA, new Radnóti
Book Expo America begins on May 29 and among all the books about God, cats, wizards, S&M, self-help and various combinations of these there will be some books in translation in the spotlight. One of these will focus on Marek Hlasko, with an event entitled “Marek Hlasko: Reviving a Literary Rebel”. Participating will be Polish […]
The Death of Joseph Roth – 75 years later
“May 27, 1939 was the day the incessant wandering that had led Joseph Roth through a change of names, religions, political allegiances and literary styles would finally come to an end at Necker Hospital in Paris after four days of delirium tremens in which he never regained consciousness. He had been drinking himself to death […]
Literalab in Bulgaria
The Sozopol Fiction Seminars take place in Sozopol, Bulgaria from May 29-June 3 with a lineup of Bulgarian and English-language writers and editors in attendance, including yours truly. The seminars are supported by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation and Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Historian and The Swan Thieves, is one of the aforementioned writers leading […]
Janusz Rudnicki in B O D Y
From the time I read “The Sorrows of Idiot Augustus” in Best European Fiction 2012 by Janusz Rudnicki, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft, I was on the lookout for anything by this fantastic writer that would breakthrough the sea of mediocrity of what gets published in English-language fiction. This turned out to be […]
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