The 20th International Book Festival Budapest runs from April 18 to 21 with Italy as the country Guest of Honor and Michel Houellebecq as the writer Guest of Honor. Houellebecq’s novel Lanzarote will be published in Hungarian for the occasion. Among the Hungarian writers attending the festival are Noémi Szécsi, György Konrád, László Krasznahorkai and […]
Latest News
Prague Writers’ Festival 2013
This year’s Prague Writers’ Festival, which takes place from April 17 to 19, has a distinctly political thrust. Grouped around the theme “The Birth of Nations” there are a pair of discussions between participating writers titled “Revolution” and “The Birth and Death of Czechoslovakia.” The star of the festival is Nobel Prize-winning Turkish writer Orhan […]
Asymptote April 2013: Russian poetry, Miklós Szentkuthy and more
Asymptote’s April 2013 issue has just come out and, as always, contains a lot of great prose, poetry and more, some of which comes from the part of the world written about hereabouts. The introduction of Hungarian writer Miklós Szentkuthy continues with an excerpt from Towards the One and Only Metaphor translated by Tim Wilkinson […]
Andrei Ruse in B O D Y
“If Americans have their dozens, their hundreds of cartoon superheroes or Hollywood starlets with their perfect smiles, if Christians have their God and Muslims have their Allah, if gays have George Michael and girls who just got their first pubes have Lady Gaga, he now has Little Mary. That’s what he’s called her, no matter […]
Literary roundup: Re-enacting massacres and monkeys with paintbrushes
“Under communism the basic building material was greyness. That’s what we all remember. Even those of us who have forgotten everything else. Communism was grey – this truism has poisoned our minds. And so, after our heroic liberation, our first reaction was to rush to a paint shop. And that’s what my country looks like […]
Central and Eastern European Lit at the London Book Fair
The 2013 London Book Fair will take place from April 15 to 17 with Turkey as this year’s guest of honor. There will be a number of writers and events that touch on Central and Eastern European literature, including: GLAS New Russian Writing will be presenting Debut Prize winners Irina Bogatyreva, Alexander Snegirev and Olga […]
Sándor Jászberényi in B O D Y
“The Blake Precept” by Sándor Jászberényi and translated by Matt Henderson Ellis is the first story in Sunday European Fiction in B O D Y. The series will present short stories and novel excerpts in translation from all over Europe, especially of the great writers you probably haven’t heard enough about variety. There will be […]
Literary roundup: An invitation for you to think – Vvedensky, Shishkin, Nabokov
On March 27, Read Russia and The New York Review of Books are co-hosting the book launch of the much awaited An Invitation for Me to Think by Alexander Vvedensky, translated by Eugene Ostashevsky, with additional translations by Matvei Yankelevich. All of these publishers, organizers and translators will be in attendance in NYC at Pravda […]
‘Švankmajer: The Last of the Great Surrealists’ in New Eastern Europe
My article on the recent Švankmajer exhibition in Prague has just been published in New Eastern Europe magazine’s Spring 2013 issue. “The Last of the Great Surrealists: Jan Švankmajer: Dimensions of Dialogue – Between Film and Fine Art” is about the Czech artist and filmmaker’s extremely diverse art and film work as well as his […]
Reading Russia – or writers from the place with onion domes
The 4th Slovo Russian Literature Festival is well underway in London. Running from March 5 to 26 the festival celebrates Russian literature old and new, along with the links between the two. This is well illustrated by lectures being given on March 15 by contemporary novelist Dmitry Bykov (Living Souls, 2011) on Boris Pasternak and […]
literalab 