After they finished the rosary, their mother made her usual plea: “Dear God, please bring Karcsi home safely from the war.” “Amen,” Péter and his father said. “No,” Karcsi said, “I don’t want to come home. Instead you should pray that I live a less depraved life in hell than I have in this world.” […]
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Pavol Rankov wins 14th Prix du livre européen
The fourteenth Prix du livre européen has been awarded to Slovak writer Pavol Rankov for his novel It Happened on the First of September with a prize of €10,000 to be presented in a ceremony in February 2021. The novel was published in a French translation in 2019, while its English translation by Magdalena Mullek […]
It Happened on the First of September | Review
It Happened on the First of September (or Some Other Time)A Historical Novel from 1938 to 1968by Pavol RankovTranslated from the Slovak by Magdalena Mullek Reviewed by Michael Stein The 20th century has no shortage of places and times known for name changes and shifts of identity. There was Golden Age Hollywood, where Brooklyn-born Margarita […]
Milan Kundera wins Kafka Prize
The Franz Kafka Society has announced that the winner of this year’s award is Milan Kundera. The 91 year-old writer responded to the announcement from Paris by phone, saying he was particularly honored to receive the Kafka Prize. The Kafka Prize has a long list of prestigious previous winners, including a brief run where it […]
Julia Lukshina in B O D Y
“As evening drew on, I tore myself away from my desk, went out into the field, and wandered this way and that, this way and that, until at some point I found myself dancing. At first it was awful: I kept stopping and looking around. But then awareness yielded to motion. I was scooping up […]
Kundera library returning to Brno
Milan Kundera, together with his wife Věra, have donated the author’s library and archive to the Moravian Library in Brno, Czech Republic. The library has announced that the transfer of books and other materials from the Kundera’s Paris apartment will take place later this fall. Besides numerous international editions of the author’s books, his articles […]
Lit_cast Slovakia #8: Michael Stein
The most recent episode of Julia Sherwood’s excellent podcast series on Slovak literature in English is me. I talk about the pros and cons of a virus-emptied center of Prague, the Central European literary sensibility and why I like it and especially about some of the Slovak writers I’ve read, written about and published in […]
Ruritania Prize 2020
Budapest-based Panel Magazine is holding a contest for original short fiction from Central and Eastern Europe. The 2020 Ruritania Prize, named after Anthony Hope’s imaginary Eastern European kingdom of in The Prisoner of Zenda, is accepting short fiction between 1,000 and 4,000 words by July 31. To qualify you have to live or have lived […]
Jan Balaban review in B O D Y
In commemoration of the death of Czech writer Jan Balabán ten years ago at the age of forty-nine, B O D Y editor Jan Zikmund has reviewed the English version of Balabán’s short story collection Maybe We’re Leaving, translated from the Czech by Charles S. Kraszewski. He writes about how Balabán writes “quiet”, compact stories […]
Pavel Vilikovský dies at 78
Slovak writer Pavel Vilikovský died Monday at 78. He was one of Slovakia’s most prominent contemporary writers and his profile in English was getting a lift with the recent translation of his novel Fleeting Snow. Previously, his Ever Green Is …: Collected Prose, translated by Charles Sabatos, was his only available work in English from […]
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