Parallel Stories by Péter Nádas is being published in the US on October 26. The 1,152 page novel took the Hungarian writer 18 years to complete, which is one the reasons it is being “hailed” as a “once-in-a-generation literary event.” Considering the recent New York Times lament that so many top American novelists like Jeffrey […]
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New Ladislav Klíma novel
Twisted Spoon Press has announced the release of Ladislav Klíma’s novella Glorious Nemesis. The publisher describes the book as “a balladic ghost story that explores the metaphysics of love and death, crime and reincarnation,” set in the mountainous Tyrol. The novella was translated from the Czech by Marek Tomin. Twisted Spoon previously published Klíma’s novel […]
‘All This Belongs to Me’ in New York
Translator Alex Zucker will be presenting and reading from his translation of Petra Hůlová’s debut novel All This Belongs to Me (Paměť mojí babičce) as part of the European Book Club at 7:00 p.m. on October 26, at the Czech Center in New York. While a guest at the 2011 Prague Writer’s Festival Hůlová did […]
Interview with Black Raven-author Vasyl Shklyar
Earlier this year Vasyl Shklyar refused the Shevchenko Prize and the $32,000 in prize money as a protest against what he considers the anti-Ukrainian policies of current Minister of Education Dmytro Tabachnyk. In an essay I linked to previously novelist Andrey Kurkov referred to Black Raven as “a rare literary scandal,” for being nominated for […]
Pushkins popping up like mushrooms
There I was, taking a perfectly innocent stroll through the woods, passing an overturned tree stump I had seen a thousand times before when I made out a shadowy figure lingering behind it, standing there suspiciously still. He looked Russian, though it was hard to tell because it was foggy and he had such a […]
First flight of the Seagull
Today in Literature informs us that it was this day in 1896 that saw the premiere of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull in St. Petersburg. The opening bombed, in a large part because the audience came expecting a conventional farce rather than the type of wordy drama that Chekhov has become famous for. Although driven backstage […]
Retranslating East of the West
Miroslav Penkov, author of East of the West:A Country in Stories, has a post on the official blog of The Story Prize about how when he first arrived in the US, in spite of telling friends he would wait to write in English until he felt comfortable with the language, he began submitting stories written […]
Kafkaesque
It begins in Prague’s Old Town of the well-known cobblestone, labyrinthine streets, where Franz Kafka was born and raised, but in this case refers more to the city of crystal ashtrays, miniature stone Golems, Kafka tee-shirts and guided tours. As the editors of “Kafkaesque: Stories Inspired by Franz Kafka” point out in their introduction, “we […]
Russian book-banners stay busy: Nabokov, Márquez, Bhagavad-Gita
Banned Books Week was recently celebrated in the US but the Russian Orthodox Church is choosing to mark the occasion with a somewhat different approach. Moscow Patriarchate PR director Vsevolod Chaplin stated that Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez should be banned because they “romanticize perverted passions that […]
Kafka awards multiplying like cockroaches
Earlier this year it was announced that Irish writer John Banville was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize. Now it is being a bit coy and imprecise of the Kafka Society to only say that Banville is coming to Prague at the end of October to accept the award without, for example, naming the actual day. […]
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