Why, oh why, do filmmakers keep trying to adapt the work of Kafka? Do they see the pitiful results and want to strike back in the writer’s honor, to make a film worthy of one of literature’s great masters? I don’t think so. So why spend the time and money in such a futile pursuit? […]
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International Literature Festival Berlin
It’s positively raining literary festivals in this part of the world. Bruno Schulz, Slovenia and now Berlin. It would be a miracle if there’s any actual writing getting done. The International Literature Festival Berlin is underway and among the Central and Eastern European writers taking part are Nobel prize winner Herta Müller, Péter Nádas (who, […]
Literary roundup: Claudio Magris, more Caucasian tales and Czech book news
The latest edition of Bookslut has Jessa Crispin’s interview with Claudio Magris, conducted in Trieste. He talks about Trieste itself, its literary culture and his relation to it. He also discusses his novel Blindly and, of course, Danube. Always fascinating. Bookslut also has an excellent review of Gombrowicz’s Diary by Daniel Shvartsman though he mistakenly […]
Slovenia’s Vilenica International Literary Festival
The 27th Vilenica International Literary Festival runs from September 5 to 9 throughout Slovenia, primarily in the region bordering Italy. “Nomadic writers” is a thematic focus at this year’s festival, with a selection of guests who amply illustrate this tendency. Bekim Sejranović is a writer from Bosnia and Herzegovina who lives in Oslo, Dimitré Dinev […]
Bruno Schulz Festival
The 5th International Bruno Schulz Festival kicks off this week in his hometown of Drohobych, Ukraine (formerly Drohobycz, Poland). Called “The Ark of Bruno Schulz’s Imagination” the festival also has some sideline events in the regional capital of Lviv, including an exhibition of his paintings and graphic works opening September 4. Schulz first exhibited in […]
Writing from the Silk Road
The latest Words Without Borders is out: Writing from the Silk Road, featuring fiction, poetry and non-fiction from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Xinjiang, China. Half of the work was actually written in Russian while the other three pieces were translated from Uzbek, Georgian and Uyghur. Exiled Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov, who has a poem […]
Kafka’s lonely planet
The BBC and Lonely Planet have posted a “Mini guide to Kafka’s Prague,” which begins with the claim that though Kafka never mentions Prague in his fiction “his tales of totalitarian bureaucracy were greatly influenced by the city.” They then proceed to demonstrate this influence by listing some hotels and telling you about the Kafka […]
Literary roundup: Russian women and Russian words
At Russia Beyond the Headlines there is an interview with Boris Pasternak’s nephew Nicolas Pasternak Slater talking about his translation of the correspondence between his family and his famous uncle as well as his current project of preparing a trilingual edition of his mother Lydia Pasternak’s poetry for publication (she wrote poetry in Russian, German […]
Literary roundup: Miklós Szentkuthy, Casanova and long Hungarian sentences
Hungarian Literature Online has published the introduction to Miklós Szentkuthy’s Marginalia on Casanova, which is being published in an English translation by Tim Wilkinson by the Contra Mundum Press in September. Szentkuthy’s obscurity in the English-speaking and reading world makes even some of Central Europe’s most obscure writers seems like the stars of their own […]
Literary roundup: Literature in translation and an uptown boy
There are some new magazines out with Central European content. Two Lines: Passageways has Julia Sherwood’s translation of an extract from Slovak writer Ján Rozner’s Seven Days to the Funeral as well as a fantastic selection of Russian poets such as Arseny Tarkovsky (the filmmaker’s father), Velmir Khlebnikov and contemporary Shamshad Abdullaev. To read a […]
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