Looking at the list of my top 10 books from 2012, plus an added three from 2011 and two from even earlier, I can’t help noticing that besides the geographical commonality (they’re all by writers from Central and Eastern Europe except the Chilean Carlos Cerda, though even he was writing about being in exile in […]
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The End is Nigh
It’s the end of the world and at Russia Beyond the Headlines (RBTH) they ask a sample of Russian writers such as German Sadulaev, Dmitry Bykov, Zakhar Prilepin and even Russian-American Gary Shteyngart about how they would spend their last day of human existence knowing the Mayans were right. The answers are interesting and unfortunately […]
Literary roundup: Crime, crows and polishness
At The Guardian author of Madame Mephisto, A. M. Bakalar writes about the UK’s invisible Polish minority, describing the wide divergence in identities between those who think of themselves as British and those who continue to exist in an almost exclusively Polish environment. The all-too-common assumption of Poles coming to the UK for higher wages […]
Absinthe #18 – Fassbinder
The latest issue of Absinthe: New European Writing is out including my essay “Rainer Werner Fassbinder: the Balzac of West Germany”. Commemorating the 30th anniversary of Fassbinder’s death at 37 years old I spoke with filmmaker Tom Kalin and president of the Fassbinder Foundation and his former editor Juliane Lorenz about the prolific filmmaker’s legacy […]
Literary roundup: The price of Russian avant-garde poetry and a Hebrew poet and photographer of Russian writers
Haaretz has a fascinating article on the rich but deeply conflicted life of the Hebrew poet and mostly St. Petersburg resident photographer Asher K. Shapiro. Having converted to Christianity on what he thought was his deathbed so he could marry his pregnant Orthodox Russian girlfriend Shapiro spent his life with the social benefits and personal […]
Literary roundup: new books, old habits
The Millions’ Year in Reading series is in full swing and frankly, what the majority of these writers and critics seem to have been reading in 2012 just reminds me that I read in an entirely different universe than they do. So many of the selections sound so quaint and dull, Romance novels with a […]
Bloody Murder in the East
New crime writing from the former Eastern Bloc – a list. Words Without Borders has just come out with its (Non-Scandinavian) Crime issue for December. It’s an excellent and varied selection though there is only one short piece from Eastern Europe in an extract from Sergey Kuznetsov’s Butterfly Skin translated by Andrew Bromfield. With that […]
‘Sin’ by Zakhar Prilepin
There are many different ways writers can infuse a story or novel with intensity without much in the way of incident or plot. The movement can occur on symbolic or historical levels, they can mine literary history as their character walks around Dublin or devote all their attention to the beauty of the individual sentences […]
Russian Big Book prize 2012
Russia’s Big Book Prize for 2012 has been won by Daniil Granin for his novel My Lieutenant, which is set during World War II. The 93-year old Granin fought in the war and the novel is told through the eyes of a soldier on the frontlines. Earlier this year a book titled Leningrad Under Siege: […]
Literary roundup: Bykov and ‘Three Sisters’ in Berlin, Prague Writers’ Festival
Russian literature, theater and art will be in the spotlight in Berlin at the RusImport festival from November 29 to December 9. Highlights include performances of Pyotr Fomenko’s production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters (in Russian with German titles). Fomenko, who passed away at 80 in August was one of the giants of Russian theater. Then, […]
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