It begins in Berlin in November 1943 as British bombs gradually do their part in shattering both the illusion and reality of the Thousand-Year Reich. Sergey Nabokov, the gay brother of then still largely unknown Vladimir, blurts out a pro-English statement at the ministry where he works as a translator that he knows full well […]
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Literary roundup: Non-death of the novel and new Danilo Kiš
Poet and translator from the Hungarian George Szirtes has a wonderful corrective about what he refers to as the “constant and loud debate” regarding the death of the novel. Starting off from the remarks at the Edinburgh Book Festival of poet Jackie Kay that it’s odd that novelists are constantly predicting the end of the […]
Angelus CE Literary Award semi-finalists
A list of 14 writers from Central Europe makes up the semi-finalists of Poland’s Angelus Central European Literature Award. The prize selects books from the region that have been published in Polish the preceding year and has had its share of big name as well as fairly obscure winners over its six-year history including Petér […]
Literary critics – nicees and meanies battle on
And the literary enthusiasm debate rolls on. What is it now – Round 2? Round 3? And this isn’t shaping up to be the type of debate that can be resolved by a decision. No, it’s going to take a knockout. The latest blows have been landed by the New York Times Dwight Garner (anti-enthusiasm) […]
Dante in the 21st Century
“If the halls of the Hermitage were suddenly to go mad, if the paintings of all the schools and great masters were suddenly to break loose from their nails, and merge with one another, intermingle and fill the air of the rooms with a futurist roar and an agitated frenzy of color, we would then […]
Literary roundup: Art, tyranny and Hungarian summer reading
“In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” This is Harry Lime’s line of shameless […]
Greetings from Gloomy Pre-Fascist Prague
In the latest issue of The Literary Review Alex Stein has an interview with Egyptian poet Yahia Lababidi that orbits around the figures of Georges Bataille, Baudelaire and Kafka. The first notable thing about this piece is that Stein has opted to rewrite some of Lababidi’s words to, as he states at the outset, “make […]
The Literary Enthusiasm Debate
The literary blogosphere has been putting on its collective gas mask, or surgical mask, or whatever kind of mask protects us against epidemics. Jacob Silverman’s article “Against Enthusiasm” deriding the “epidemic of niceness in online book culture” at Slate has been getting around, presumably read, probably even debated a bit. It’s example of everyone’s friend, […]
The quaint phenomenon of the novel
At The Brooklyn Rail, English philosopher Simon Critchley takes on the subject of contemporary art in an article entitled “Absolutely-Too-Much.” It’s a fascinating article, but what struck me was his outright dismissal of the novel’s cultural import: “It is simply a fact that contemporary art has become the central placeholder for the articulation of cultural […]
Literary roundup: Egon Bondy and still controversial modernism
“The concept of being and non-being is a philosophical con” – Egon Bondy At the Czech Literature Portal I wrote about the fact that you can see a documentary about Czech writer Egon Bondy online for free and with English subtitles. Titled The Last Lesson of Egon Bondy the 32-minute film is full of the […]
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