From October 19 to 21 neighbor of my former graduate school Claremont McKenna University is hosting a cenntenial festival devoted to Czesław Miłosz with a interesting program and varied array of guests. Absolute tops in terms of title is Polish intellectual, historian and journalist Adam Michnik’s talk – Miłosz: Man Among Scorpions, which seems to […]
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Yuri Andrukhovych on the cultural losers of the contemporary world
“But who would Joyce be if he wrote not in English but, say, in Albanian?” It is not only the existence of Central Europe that can be called into question apparently, but of Europe itself. “Perhaps Europe as a single entity actually does not exist after all,” begins a lecture presented at last month’s European […]
The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia
The first installment of literalab: Best Reads, in which sometimes neglected books from and about Central and Eastern Europe are put in the spotlight they deserve .. The Degaev Affair That reality is stranger than fiction must once have been an original and thought-provoking point. Today, it is taken for granted, a cliché even, leaving […]
An exciting time for Czech literature
Czech writers such as Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal and Josef Škvorecký were an imposing presence in world literature in the last few decades of the 20th century. Today, a new generations of Czech novelists is beginning to make its mark. Coming off a recent appearance at the International Literature Festival Berlin, novelist Tomáš Zmeškal spoke […]
19th century Polish manuscript found in Moscow
When I hear of looted cultural artifacts I think of the image of train cars stuffed with Old Master paintings and objets d’art steaming back in the opposite direction of equally packed troop trains. Then come accusations and bitter quarrels, pleas of national patrimony and then lawsuits and more lawsuits. In fact many of the […]
Angelus award semi-finalists
The 14 semi-finalists for the Angelus Central European Literature Award have been announced, including works by writers such as Andrzej Stasiuk, Jenny Erpenbeck and Ismail Kadare. The award is for a Central European novel published in Poland and will be presented to the chosen winner at a mysterious future date in the Polish city of […]
Penguin Lost
There are at least a couple of ways to read novels that come in a series – as stand-alone books with similar characters and themes, or as a single novel broken up for practical reasons. In the case of Andrey Kurkov’s tale of the misadventures of failed writer Viktor Zolotaryov and his pet penguin Misha […]
The Siege of Sziget
The difficulties of getting writing translated into foreign languages is often taken as a particularly current subject, as if the glut and popularity of English-language bestsellers, the Internet and modern publishing are obviously to blame. But the case of Miklós Zrínyi would make even the most happily obscure contemporary poet shudder. He published his Hungarian […]
Slowness: the exhibition
A New York gallery presents an exhibition of art inspired by the concepts behind Milan Kundera’s 1995 novel “Slowness” The writing of Milan Kundera has had considerable influence in the world of literature since his first novel “The Joke” was published to international acclaim in 1967. Kundera has also written extensively on music, film and […]
Alois Nebel: Czech history in B&W
An innovative animated film shows often dark passages of Czech history through the eyes of a small-town stationmaster At a press conference presenting the film “Alois Nebel,” Jaroslav Rudiš recounted how he and co-writer Jaromír 99 (the pen name of Jaromír Švejdík) came up with the original idea for the comic on an autumn evening […]
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