“Sometimes we bought newspapers and divided up the pages while we made small talk, hoping to kill time and trying to ignore our reflection in the gigantic mirrors behind the bar, where a dark and twisted version of ourselves looked back at us, mocking us from an alternate world where we—that couple sunk in a […]
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Afterwords: Right time for ‘The Sublimes’?
“Shatuny [The Sublimes] was first published in Russia only after the collapse of the Soviet system. Before that, it was published in the West. The reaction in the West was unusual. One American reviewer noted that the world was not ready for such a book. I believe now it is perfectly ready for this book.” […]
Yuri Mamleyev in B O D Y
He stepped into the bushes to fool around a little. “What can I say about Grigory,” he thought later, “when I don’t even know whether I exist?” From The Sublimes by Yuri Mamleyev, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz. This highly influential cult classic from 1968 has never before been translated into English and […]
Literary roundup: Monumental Georgi Markov and remnants of former regimes
In The Nation there’s a thorough and fantastic article about Bulgarian writer and exiled dissident Georgi Markov titled “A Captivating Mind: How Georgi Markov became the truth-teller of Bulgaria’s communist era, and paid for it with his life.” Playwright, novelist, essayist and journalist, Markov was murdered on orders of the Bulgarian secret service in London […]
Bologna Children’s Book Fair
Yiddish poems, a Ukrainian math adventure and Joycean cat-heavy view of Copenhagen are among the acclaimed children’s books at this year’s festival. The 51st edition of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair kicks of March 24 with Brazil as the guest of honor. As usual, there are a lot of interesting writers and books beings presented […]
Literary roundup: Hugo-Bader and handicapped-equipped Potemkin villages
Polish writer and journalist Jacek Hugo-Bader will be appearing at the Oxford Literary Festival on March 28 to recount “his journey through one of the remotest and baddest parts of Russia” in an event titled “Kolyma Diaries: A Journey into Russia’s Haunted Hinterland”: Hugo-Bader travelled the 2,000km Kolyma highway hearing the tales of those who […]
Literary roundup: Polish crime goes big time and two tragicomic views
I have been expressing my admiration for Central European crime writing since I was practically a baby, but being a baby no one understood what I was saying, so it took until I started Literalab and began writing about it that my admiration took on intelligible form. Since then I have surveyed regional crime fiction […]
Literary roundup: Readux Series 2 launch, Marian Schwartz
Today’s Authors & Translators featured translator is the celebrated Marian Schwartz (and her authors – we shouldn’t forget the authors, after all) with a fascinating interview. Among other things, she discusses her soon to be published version of Anna Karenina (August 2014) and the intimacy of being able to work personally with an author, something […]
Tadeusz Dabrowski in B O D Y
“I’m making notes from Lacan, I turn the page in my notebook and come upon the sprawled foetus of a poem…” The beginning of the first of two poems by Tadeusz Dąbrowski translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in B O D Y. And that, after some Polish fiction by Agnieszka Taborska in last […]
Afterwords: The most exquisite of corpses
Agnieszka Taborska’s novel Niedokończone życie Phoebe Hicks (The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks) was published in Poland in 2013. Selected excerpts of the completed translation by Ursula Phillips were published in Saturday European Fiction in B O D Y. In extracts from Polish reviews of the novel translated by Julia Sherwood you can read about […]
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