“When Phoebe Hicks conducted her first séance, when she became the first medium in New England, when her fame began to entice other women to embark on a similar career, no one foresaw, of course, what would distinguish her from her successors. This difference, not so crucial at first glance, fundamentally influenced Phoebe’s story.” From […]
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Leipzig Book Fair 2014
The Leipzig Book Fair is underway as of yesterday, and as always there is a lot of eastward looking literary fare on the agenda, kicking off today with something about Euromaidan that has Yuri Andrukhovych, Andrei Kurkov and writer and singer Irina Karpa among the panel participants (I say “something about Euromaidan” because the program […]
Best Translated Book Award 2014 Fiction Longlist
The BTBA Fiction Longlist has just been released and, unlike the recently released International Foreign Fiction Prize 2014 longlist*, has some notable work from Central and Eastern Europe on it. First of all, regarding the IFFP list, and I don’t want to sound like Vladimir Putin (though I too have been accused of being both […]
Literary roundup: Translating Winkler, Leo Perutz and Ukrainian poetry
In the newly published issue of The Quarterly Conversation there is an exchange between two translators of the Austrian writer Josef Winkler, Bernard Banoun and Adrian West, who translate him into French and English respectively. Between Banoun’s account of visiting Winkler’s hometown with him (“…imagine visiting Illiers-Combray with Proust or Yoknapatawpha with Faulkner” he writes.) […]
Literary roundup: Translated Russians, provincial Americans and a confused and self-conscious writer
The shortlist for the Rossica Translation Prize 2014 has been announced for the best translation from Russian and it’s a pitched battle between five books. Interestingly, only one of the books’ authors is still alive, as one was quite famously killed in a duel (and that in 1837, so he wouldn’t be showing up at […]
Ukraine 2014: undivided but not unprecedented
Two novelists, among many others – not to mention a host of non-novelists – have thrown in their two cents on the situation in Ukraine from two very different points of view. Natalka Sniadanko is a Ukrainian writer and translator (of Kafka, Czesław Miłosz, Olga Tokarczuk and Zbigniew Herbert among others). Writing in the New […]
Afterwords: Russian invasions
A Russian military invasion has been at the top of the headlines, and with the publication of the opening chapter of Zakhar Prilepin’s novel Sankya in B O D Y last weekend, it’s timely to point to an excellent article by Phoebe Taplin in Russia Beyond The Headlines (RBTH) on the long Russian literary tradition […]
Zakhar Prilepin in B O D Y
“Sasha noticed some busses bearing the coat of arms with a fanged beast. The curtains in the bus windows trembled. People were sitting in those busses, waiting for an opportunity to step out, to run out, clutching rubber mallets in tough fists, looking angrily for somebody to hit, and to hit them with flourish, to […]
Literary roundup: a Slovak Forrest Gump and a writer’s Bucharest
The Missing Slate has published an excerpt from the fantastic novel Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book by Slovak writer Daniela Kapitáňová and translated by Julia Sherwood. The book was published in the UK by Garnett Press in 2011 but has yet to find a US publisher. First published in Slovakia in 2000 to great success the […]
Literary roundup: No paradise for bored readers
At World Literature Today translator and publisher Ross Ufberg talks about translating Vladimir Lorchenkov’s The Good Life Elsewhere, translation in general and the newly established New Vessel Press. The interview is full of interesting and fairly optimistic takes on publishing literature in translation: “… I have read lots of Russian novels in my life and […]
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