The story in Saturday European Fiction this week – “Slow Walking Course” by Uršuľa Kovalyk – contained the same disturbing and darkly humorous combination of the humdrum every day and the magically surreal that I found so striking in the first story of hers I read – “Mrs. Agnes’s Bathroom.” That story was included in […]
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Ursula Kovalyk in B O D Y
“Perhaps he’s gone crazy, it occurs to me. Or have I gone crazy? The inspector inside me applies her most powerful lever – my conscience – but I can no longer weep. Even my tears are stuck somewhere beneath my eyelids. I’ve been living on the trolleybus for two weeks now. The passengers are peculiar. […]
Literary roundup: Dmitri Novoselov in WWB and more lit in translation
Russian writer Dmitri Novoselov recently had his English-language debut in B O D Y with the short story “Alevtina”. Now, with the release of the September 2013 Black Markets issue of Words Without Borders he has another work looking back at the chaotic and often absurd decade in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet […]
Boris Dezulovic in B O D Y
“That New Year little Mensur Ćeman learned that Grandfather Frost really did exist, but that he was not the kind old man from the Coca-Cola ad bringing colorfully wrapped presents for the children—he was an infidel arsonist, and it was because of him that he now lived at his Uncle Irfan’s and had to go […]
Afterwords: From ‘The Swimmer’ to ‘The Swimmers’
B O D Y’s Saturday European Fiction this week was an excerpt from the novel The Swimmers by Joaquín Pérez Azaústre, published today August 27, 2013. The title, and not only the title, is evocative of another very well-known short story and film, “The Swimmer”, written by John Cheever and published in 1964 and brought […]
Joaquin Perez Azaustre in B O D Y
“These are pursuits which escape his comprehension, though he knows they exist, that all this human matter and its temporal framework are what the city feeds on: what would happen if all these people suddenly vanished into thin air, if the children never went back to school and their parents failed to appear punctually and […]
Contemporary writing from Macedonia
The most recent work in B O D Y’s Saturday European Fiction was “Scribbles” by Macedonian writer Rumena Bužarovska, while a month earlier there was a story by another Macedonian writer, Ivan Dodovski, who has another work forthcoming in the magazine. Macedonia is a country of just over two million people but has its share […]
Rumena Buzarovska in B O D Y
“The pens… the pencils… the paper… look… I’ve been writing,” I said to him, taking my wet hands out of the fridge again. Water began to drip onto the mess of paper on the kitchen bench. “What are these squiggles? What on earth have you been doing?” He started to grab my little hurricanes and […]
‘Under This Terrible Sun’ in B O D Y
This doesn’t have anything to do with Central and Eastern European writing but I was very happy to publish an excerpt from Argentine writer Carlos Busqued’s debut novel Under This Terrible Sun in B O D Y and so am posting it here. It’s a truly phenomenal novel – dark but not gloomy, filled with […]
Lubomír Martínek in B O D Y
Milan Kundera wasn’t the only Czech writer to leave Czechoslovakia for France in the 1970s. Living a shadowy existence in another country is the subject of Lubomír Martínek’s story “Refugee” translated by Charles Sabatos. “Because the harbor was such a favored refuge for people escaping from various regimes, a lot of former political prisoners lived […]
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