The European Commission has come out with its list of translation grant recipients, otherwise known as “Strand 1.2.2 : Support for Literary Translations: selection results.” You can go to the official website and click on the link to a bunch of PDF charts and graphs that are about as unliterary as you can get, or […]
Latest News
What the Emperor Cannot Do: Tales and Legends of the Orient by Vlas Doroshevich
Russian writer and journalist Vlas Doroshevich is not the only writer of parablelike stories exploring issues of justice and power who died in the 1920’s and whose work seems to illuminate the much darker period of history that followed his death, when the liquid that smoothed the grinding wheels of bureaucracy was revealed to be […]
Literary roundup: the other kind of literary agents
B O D Y A new Prague-based international literary magazine has just come out. B O D Y is run by editors Joshua Mensch, Christopher Crawford, Stephan Delbos and contains a selection of poetry, fiction and an essay on three neglected American women poets from the early 20th century by poet, writer and translator Richard […]
Book fairs without authors
The structuralist notion of texts without authors is given a non-theoretical equivalent in ongoing Saudi book fair participation The recently held Seoul International Book Fair presented some new and upcoming translations of Czech writers, but another connection between the two distant countries is that the guest of honor in Seoul was the same controversial guest […]
Phantom Countries – On the Road to Babadag by Andrzej Stasiuk
My review of Andrzej Stasiuk’s On the Road to Babadag in the summer issue of The Cerise Press. “They lived in the old Jewish quarter, at the edge of a Slovak town, at the foot of a Hungarian castle, so in order to exist and not disappear, they had to create their own rules, their […]
PEN is mightier than S.W.O.R.D.*
The 2012 PEN Translation Fund Grants have been announced, with the work of two Central European writers among the final 12. A Hóhér Háza (The Hangman’s House) by Andrea Tompa, translated by Bernard Adams tells the story of a Hungarian-Romanian family living through the final two decades of Ceauşescu’s Romania. Tompa is president of the […]
The drama of Czech literature
The international Theatre Festival of European Regions is underway in Hradec Králové, boasting work by and about Czech and international writers. Read more at the Czech Literature Portal Photos – 1) Alexander Grin’s Morgiana, photo by Petr Neubert, 2) Martin Františák’s The Čapek Case, photo by Bohdan Holomíček Petr Neubert
Literary roundup: Croatian writers online, Polish writers on stage
Just discovered an excellent site devoted to Croatian writers – Critical Mass (Kritična masa) – is available in Croatian, English and German versions, and features both well-known and (for me at least) much lesser-known writers. There are author pages for Daša Drndić, whose novel Trieste was recently published in English and which I’ll have a […]
How a South American Hunter Discovered Europe
A year spent in Prague is hardly an unusual experience these days for students, former students and all sorts of uncategorizable people in various phases of life. But the story of a South-American Indian spending a year in Prague back in 1908 presents a unique and fascinating story that seems as likely to come from […]
Literary roundup: Russian literature in Asia
Writing in the Malay Insider, Erna Mahyuni compares government interference in Russia and Malaysia through the prism of her favorite author Mikhail Bulgakov. Where Putin’s Russia has a new anti-protest law, Malaysia has a peaceful assembly law. And where writers in Stalin’s Soviet Union were pushed towards acceptable themes and subjects to write about, the […]
literalab 