The second installment of Peter Mendelsund’s series of essays on jacketing fiction is up, in which he asks whether designers “are, or should be, in the business of representing the underlying themes put forward by the works of fiction that we are charged with making jackets for.” There is a lot of Central and Eastern […]
Latest News
Arthur Koestler: 20th Century Man
It is “best reads of the year” time, so for this Best Reads I am writing about one of the best books I read in 2011. Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual by Michael Scammell (The US edition is titled Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic) In the early decades of the 20th […]
Traces of Gombrowicz
Poland’s Museum of Literature has sent off two members of its staff in the footsteps of novelist Witold Gombrowicz on a journey from Warsaw to Buenos Aires. Not that these intrepid museum employees are planning to remain in Argentina for decades in relative obscurity, creating works of literary genius (although you never know). In fact, […]
Pushkin’s Queen of Spades
Books on film Adapting literature to cinema usually does not make for a pretty story. There are any number of reasons. Some novels are inherently unfilmable. Others are dumbed down and commercialized to the point that traces of the original become nearly impossible to detect. Sometimes a talented, even brilliant director, say Orson Welles, takes […]
Gogol, refuge and translations: new magazines
“I like the bigness and darkness of 19th-century Russian literature. (I brought Crime and Punishment with me on my honeymoon.)” – Roddy Doyle [No word on what his wife brought]. Roddy Doyle, of The Commitments fame, has a brilliant article in The Irish Times on his translation of Gogol’s The Government Inspector currently playing in […]
Banville in Prague
The day after the ceremony in which he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in Prague, Irish novelist John Banville came to the Kafka Society’s basement haunts and, against the backdrop of Kafka’s old library, spoke about his work, murderers (and looking like a murderer), Nabokov, and a number of other things. Below is the […]
Bruno lives
Polish writer Bruno Schulz continues to gain some of the acknowledgement he failed to obtain during his tragically shortened life. Earlier this month a festival devoted to Schulz took place in Lublin in Eastern Poland, not far from his native Drohobycz (today Drohobych, Ukraine). The festival is called Bruno4ever, a title which, if Schulz were […]
European noir
The 8th Annual Festival of European Literature starts on November 15 in New York, with this year’s title being Crime Scene: Europe. Noir fiction writers participating include Zygmunt Miłoszewski (Poland), Ana Maria Sandu (Romania), Stefan Slupetzky (Austria), José Carlos Somoza (Spain), Caryl Férey (France), Jan Costin Wagner (Germany) and Dan Fesperman (US). “Europe is in […]
Mikhail Bulgakov, star of stage and screen
Having come to his full powers as a writer whose novels and stories could not be published during Stalin’s growing stranglehold on power, whose plays could almost never hope to be performed, Bulgakov is now a hot commodity in the entertainment world. The latest news is that Stone Village Pictures – makers of The Human […]
Martin Ryšavý wins Škvorecký Prize for Czech literature
An article in Czech Position on the 2011 Josef Škvorecký Prize going to Czech novelist, screenwriter and documentary filmmaker Martin Ryšavý for his novel Vrač. Continue Reading
literalab 