For a fifth year European Literature Night is taking place in cities throughout the continent. On May 15 work by writers dead and alive will be celebrated in a host of interesting locations, in both cosmopolitan locales whose names evoke a long cultural history – Florence, Bucharest, Vienna, London, Prague – all the way to […]
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Jelena Lengold in B O D Y
“ … and for a moment he felt himself flagging inside her, that helped him, in fact, to wriggle out again and push her onto her back, now she was looking at him a little surprised, a little breathless, her eyes were shining like some crazed junkie’s, her pupils were enormous, she had placed her […]
Literary Roundup: Translating world voices
The PEN World Voices festival is underway in New York, running from April 29 to May 5. There are a lot of great events, including Mikhail Shishkin speaking on a panel about book reviewers, a conversation with Polish author of Russians in Warsaw Agata Tuszyńska, a Literary Safari including Hungarian Noémi Szécsi and Czech Michal […]
Vlas Doroshevich in B O D Y
“Abl-Eddin bowed and said: ‘You can execute me but you should grant me a fair trial. You can impale me, but let us first ask the people if they really grumble, if they are really discontented. You have the means to do so. I myself gave you these means. You can turn them against me […]
Marek Krajewski’s Dark Conjuring Act
This week’s Friday Pick in B O D Y: “Open the pages of one of Marek Krajewski’s Eberhard Mock novels and you plunge into a unique and haunting world. It is a world pressed between the oppressive shadows of the two World Wars and seemingly losing its mind because of it; a world of secret […]
Literary roundup: Hakl, Kurkov and a Croatian Iraqi Windy City
Czech writer Emil Hakl has a novel Of Kids and Parents and story collection On Flying Objects in English translation. Now Tinge Magazine has an excerpt from The Witch’s Flight, which is being published by Twisted Spoon Press later this year, in a translation by Marek Tomin, who previously translated Hakl’s novel. There is also […]
Werfel in new ‘Review of Contemporary Fiction’
The Dalkey Archive Press has just published the Review of Contemporary Fiction: The Future of British Fiction. This is the Fall 2012 issue but don’t worry, it doesn’t mean that we now have months and months of cold weather in front of us (at least I hope it doesn’t). As usual, if you want to […]
Nora Iuga in B O D Y
“And suddenly I saw comrade Weed get up fast in the moonlight, and I heard a Jesus-fuckin’-Christ immediately muffled by the mat-lined earthen walls. That’s when I made out my friend’s greenish, frozen face, her eyelids lowered, her mouth gasping for air like a fish in an aquarium without water.” An excerpt from the novel […]
Literary roundup: Polish writers, Thor Garcia and Erich Kästner
I recently had the pleasure of hearing Prague-based writer Thor Garcia read from his most recent novel Only Fools Die of Heartbreak. Now the Czech Literature Portal has an interview with Garcia in which he talks about the mythical early 90s, his journalism and writing, Czech culture and “drab” American fiction. Having just written about […]
Interview with author of ‘Keeping Bedlam at Bay in the Prague Café’
At Hungarian Literature Online there is an interview with Matt Henderson Ellis, whose novel Keeping Bedlam at Bay in the Prague Café was recently published by New Europe Books. The interview is titled “Prague kind of lends itself to neurosis,” which has instantly become my automated answer to the perpetual “Why did you move to […]
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