Major magazines aren’t usually littered with articles about publishing associate art directors but the past couple days Hollywood stars and other celebrities have had to take a back seat to the man who holds that position at Alfred A. Knopf, designing book jackets for new editions of Kafka, a new translation of Doctor Zhivago, Cortazar’s […]
Asymptote’s third anniversary issue is out and, as always, is full of great fiction, poetry, and more than I can list here. Among the highlights are Michael Hofmann’s brilliant essay on Wolfgang Koeppen, a writer who is a thousand times better than most of the names presented as the greats of the second half of […]
On March 27, Read Russia and The New York Review of Books are co-hosting the book launch of the much awaited An Invitation for Me to Think by Alexander Vvedensky, translated by Eugene Ostashevsky, with additional translations by Matvei Yankelevich. All of these publishers, organizers and translators will be in attendance in NYC at Pravda […]
Prague literary journal B O D Y has an unbelievable story from award-winning Czech writer Tomáš Zmeškal. “Vision of Hitler,” translated by Nathan Fields, is a story that is even more unnerving in keeping the reader guessing what kind of story it is than in its ultimate subject matter (though that’s unnerving too). What begins […]
Yesterday I posted about an article defining the influence of Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilych on the psychological and medical approach to death. It turns out that the usefulness of Russian literature goes beyond the medical profession, as Thomas de Waal points out in an excellent article in Foreign Policy. With a tip […]
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