2013 winner of the Magnesia Litera prize for his novel Rybí krev (Fish Blood), Jiří Hájíček will be appearing in London together with his English translator Gale A. Kirking. The event will take place at the Slovak Embassy on October 17. Kirking will read from his translation of Hájíček’s highly successful novel Rustic Baroque (Selský […]
Latest News
Ioso Havilio in B O D Y
Paradises might be a reimagining of Camus’ Outsider – but in female form and living in 21st-century Buenos Aires. Our narrator allows the hazards of death and chance encounters to lead her through the city, where she sleepwalks into a job in the zoo’s reptile house, and another administering morphine to one of the oddball […]
Pavel Vilikovsky in B O D Y
“As far as I’m aware, none of the big shots in the Third Reich was a sadist. All four committed suicide. Hitler and Goebbels did so even before Germany capitulated. Himmler followed when he realized his captors weren’t going to treat him as an important statesman but rather as a criminal, while the hedonist Goering […]
Publishing translated fiction and reading Argentine writing
A lot of the publishers of translated fiction have been weighing in recently on the state of affairs. Now publisher Stefan Tobler takes the occasion of his And Other Stories third anniversary to add his own assessment of the challenges of bringing out legitimately interesting, unique books in the English-speaking world, with its closed-minded philistinism […]
Afterwords: Darkness and love in Romania
I remember the first time I saw a Romanian movie as a teenager, it was from the Ceaușescu era of course, just as I was from the Reagan one. In fact, my entire teenage years were confined within the great communicator’s two terms in office. Not that I’d compare myself to a victim of a […]
Cecilia Stefanescu in B O D Y
“A hand migrated to the abdomen; the other was on its way to the other iceberg. But the encounter with the left breast was even worse. The coldness, the skin wrinkled over the flesh, made him shiver. And time stopped still again, as if the coldness of the body he was groping had overflowed into […]
Book Review: ‘Under This Terrible Sun’
Last month B O D Y published an excerpt from Argentine writer Carlos Busqued’s debut novel Under This Terrible Sun, just recently published in Megan McDowell’s English translation. Now, I have written a review of the book for this week’s Friday Pick. Read the review, read the excerpt, read the novel – not necessarily in […]
Ivan Dodovski in B O D Y pt. 2
“Those are just rungs, you poor people, rungs in the pecking order; I scaled them carefully, on my guard, one at a time, onwards towards the top. Push down whoever is beneath you, lick the heels of whoever is above, lick until he stumbles, then see him down, and you can continue one rung further […]
Valery Ronshin in B O D Y pt. 2
“One Autumn evening I was sitting at home, writing a story about love. Simply about love. About love and nothing but. A young man meets a girl. Through the narrow alleys of some little seaside town, they reach the sea and plod along the beach… Deserted. Dusky. Empty of people. Because it’s already November. Winter. […]
The fragments from Miklos Radnoti’s final day of freedom
During the Second World War Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti was subject to forced labor because he was Jewish and was called up three times. The final time came on May 20, 1944, when he was sent to a German labor camp in Bor, Serbia, where he worked in the copper mines. On May 19, the […]
literalab 