“After the difficulties I have encountered in trying to bring my edifying and instructive animal tales to the public I would have sold my soul to get them published. Now I no longer have even a soul, as I passed on last spring and I’ve been sucking men’s blood ever since, just like my grandmother. […]
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Literary roundup: Jerusalem Festival and a publisher’s campaign
“The mist that came from the Mediterranean sea blotted out the city that Pilate so detested. The suspension bridges connecting the temple with the grim fortress of Antonia vanished, the murk descended from the sky and drowned the winged gods above the hippodrome, the crenellated Hasmonaean palace, the bazaars, the caravanserai, the alleyways, the pools […]
Jan Karski’s ‘Story of a Secret State’
On April 23, 2012 US President Barack Obama announced that he would award the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest honor, to Polish Resistance fighter Jan Karski. Earlier this year in Poland the parliament announced the commemoration of Karski’s centennial in 2014, including a monument to be built to him in Warsaw as well […]
Literary roundup: reading material for the rest of your life
Read Russia I just discovered the Read Russia 2012 site which has everything from video interviews with Olga Slavnikova, Boris Akunin and other well-known writers to a timeline with information on a range of Russian writers – from Andrei Gelasimov, whose Thirst I highly recommend, to some writers who look young enough to be my […]
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The American compulsion to write autobiographical novels is a literary dead end Almost exactly a year ago, with the PEN World Voices Festival of international literature taking place I used the occasion of reviewing Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2011 to prop up the Berlin Wall I thought of as separating European and American fiction. […]
Czech Surrealist brought out of hiding
The first solo retrospective of Jindřich Heisler provides a long overdue look at a unique man who created unique art under unique circumstances Jindřich Heisler: Surrealism under Pressure at Chicago’s Art Institute presents 70 works by the still little-known Czech Surrealist whose work straddles the line between a variety of artistic media. The exhibition also […]
Literary roundup: Pre-war Warsaw and Russian dystopias
Literary roundup: Pre-war Warsaw and Russian dystopias The first English translation of a book by Polish-Jewish author Józef Hen will be published later this month, according to the Polish Book Institute’s website. Nowolipie Street is a 1991 memoir of growing up in the lost world of Jewish Warsaw in the 1920s and 30s, up until […]
Poet and translator Jerome Rothenberg
Jerome Rothenberg was a guest at this year’s Prague Writers’ Festival and the acclaimed American poet spoke to me about his experience translating German and Czech poets, giving Nezval a voice in English and not speaking Yiddish with Paul Celan. Literalab: You’ve translated a number of German poets such as Paul Celan, and I was […]
Marat/Sade at Prague psychiatric hospital
One of the landmarks of modern theater, Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade, will be performed at Prague’s Bohnice psychiatric hospital As a play about asylum inmates putting on a play of the death of French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, Weiss’ work already casts a kaleidoscopic glance at political conformity and extremism of two distinct eras of history. With […]
Literary roundup: Russia’s sacred monsters
Big Russian novels are in the air as of late. At The Millions eight experts weigh in on George Steiner’s Tolstoy or Dostoevsky question. I read Steiner’s book a fairly long time ago and don’t remember him actually answering that question, which seems to be the standard reaction among the experts. Actually, I think the […]
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