Czech writer Petra Hůlová recently published her novel The Movement in an English translation by Alex Zucker. I took the occasion to ask her about the origins of the book, the critical reaction to the oppressive feminist dystopia she imagined and what distinguishes it from the staples of the genre like, The Handmaid’s Tale, among […]
Petra Hůlová’s latest novel translated into English (by Alex Zucker) is a provocative dystopian world where “men have been forbidden to be attracted to women on the basis of their bodies”. The Movement – the novel’s title – have opened centers to “reeducate” men, and as the book goes along you realize how the extreme […]
With Prague Book World coming up a series of events are being held in conjunction with the English-language publication of J.R. Pick’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, a tragicomic novel of a thirteen-year-old Czech boy sent to the Terezín ghetto. On Thursday, May 10th at 6:30 pm, Karolinum Press and The Bubny […]
Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life by Josef Jedlička, written between 1954 and 1957, might seem, on the surface, like a novel an English-language reader has some experience of. After all, Kundera and Hrabal have written of the Stalinist 50s – (Hrabal-readers most recently being granted access to his short stories from the 50s […]
Alex Zucker, translator of Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street, the newly released crime novel by Heda Margolius Kovály, will be appearing this evening Oct 5 at 7pm at the Globe bookstore and cafe for a reading and conversation about the book. Innocence is a thriller set in 1950s Communist Czechoslovakia and was published in […]
On June 18 New York’s Czech Center will be hosting the release of Heda Margolius Kovály’s novel, Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street. Heda Margolius Kovály (1919-2010) is most famous for her memoir Under A Cruel Star – A Life in Prague 1941–1968 but in 1985 she wrote her crime novel, finally translated this year […]
From fairy tales retold with some irreverent twists, along with scenes from the Macedonian past, present and unreality to two very different worlds of implicit and explicit violence on either end of Soviet domination – one in Dagestan after the fall of communism, the other in newly occupied Prague in the 50s. Innocence; or, Murder […]
If you’re at the London Book Fair today you can attend a discussion this evening on the broader and still broadening scope of contemporary Czech writing with translators Julia Sherwood, Alex Zucker and hosted by editorial director of Words without Borders Susan Harris. Sherwood is the translator of B O D Y’s most recent Saturday […]
Czech writer Magdaléna Platzová is appearing in New York City for the New Literature From Europe festival from Dec. 5 to 6, and for the occasion I have an interview with her in Words Without Borders, where her short story, “This Time Last Year”, ran in last month’s Czech issue in a translation from Czech […]
Hungarian writer and foreign correspondent Sándor Jászberényi has an article (subscriber’s only though I managed to read it free the other day) on the death of a Kurdish Peshmerga fighter he had met and the particular significance of her being a woman. It’s a very powerful story and reminiscent of the writing in his story […]
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