Argentine writer Carlos Busqued died on March 29, 2021 at the age of 50. His second novel Magnetized was published in English translation last year, having followed the translation of his debut Under This Terrible Sun in 2013. I reviewed both of the books in B O D Y and we published an excerpt of […]
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Witches Sabbath | Review
Witches Sabbath By Maurice Sachs Translated from the French by Richard Howard 2020, Spurl Editions, 276 pp. Maurice Sachs was born in Paris in 1906, when the Belle Époque was giving way to modernity, and grew up nourished by that golden age of French culture in a way that seems unimaginable today. His grandfather was […]
Top 100 Books
The Calvert Journal has compiled a list of 100 books to read from Eastern Europe (also Central Europe) and Central Asia. It’s a fascinating list put together by a wide range of writers, translators, academics coming from a number of different countries and languages besides English. The list includes a number of books and writers […]
The Flight of Icarus – in Phantom Drift
“How far do you have to go to be free of the threat of imprisonment? Up in the air, the idea of confinement suddenly became nonsensical. There were no walls, nothing solid to keep you still. On the earth though, there were borders and barracks and armed guards…” From my short story “The Flight of […]
Literary roundup: WWB’s Young Russophonia + Rankov interview
Books From Slovakia has a fantastic interview Daniela Balážová held with Slovak writer Pavol Rankov, author of the recently translated It Happened on the First of September. Among many topics Rankov talks about how the different translations deal with all the different languages used in the novel (spoiler: differently) and also talks about the lost multicultural […]
Literary roundup: Balabán, Barnás and books
For their series “The Czech Books You Must Read”, Czech Radio has an interview with my B O D Y co-editor Jan Zikmund from the Czech Literary Centre on Jan Balabán, whose novel Where Was the Angel Going? was recently published by Glagoslav Publications in a translation by Charles S. Kraszewski. The same publisher/translator combo […]
Ludovic Bruckstein stories
For the occassion of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Istros Books is publishing Ludovic Bruckstein’s collection With an Unopened Umbrella in the Pouring Rain, translated from the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth. Bookanista has an excerpt from the novel here as well as a review of a pair of novellas published by Istros as The Trap. There […]
Nezval in B O D Y
I greet your gliding flight O wings of deathThose who resisted itHave purple facesHave bloodshot eyes like a withering grape leaf – from the latest offering in the Winter 2021 Issue of B O D Y is a poem titled “The Trapdoor”, excerpted from the 1936 work of poet Vítězslav Nezval, Woman in the Plural, […]
Death of the Artists: Marinetti’s Last Stand
Marinetti was both the Malcolm McLaren and Johnny Rotten of his era, the impresario and figurehead of what was early 20th century punk. He charmed his audience with shock and provocation, telling his Russian hosts that the Kremlin was an absurdity, Tolstoy hypocritical, Dostoevsky hysterical, responded to a question about Russian art by asking if […]
Magnetized | Review | Winter Issue
In 1982, Ricardo Luis Melogno murdered four taxi drivers in the space of a week in Buenos Aires. He has been locked up in prison or psychiatric institutions ever since, and now is cast in a legal limbo from which he may never be released. Argentine writer Carlos Busqued, whose debut novel Under This Terrible […]
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