As the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues along with the war of information accompanying it there has been a tendency to turn away from anything Russian as a gesture of solidarity with Ukraine. What this leaves out are Russian voices of dissent, voices that speak out despite the growing and significant risks involved. Among those […]
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 […]
Russian writer Aleksei Lukyanov begins his story “Entwives” with a reference to the aforementioned entwives from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the female tree creatures lost to their male tree-creature counterparts. But then the story takes a precipitous turn into pretty rough Russian schoolyard banter before taking a few darker a very […]
Way back in 2013 when the world wasn’t utterly collapsing I had the foresight to publish an excerpt from Balla’s novella In the Name Of the Father, translated from the Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood. Now the book has been published by Jantar Publishing and translator Charles Sabatos has written about it in the […]
Alisa Ganieva will be in New York City on Thursday, June 18 for a launch of her newly translated novel The Mountain and the Wall. The event is sponsored by Read Russia and will involve a discussion between the author and translator, publisher and academic Ronald Meyer at Book Culture on 112th St. The novel […]
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 […]
The New York Times has an article that uses the occasion and course of the Prague Marathon to venture into Czech dissidence and history as well as some very interesting issues of a renewal of interest in political debate among the younger generation of artists and writers and how this is controversial. The whole article […]
Throughout August, Literalab will be asking writers, translators and publishers to comment on both the women writers from their own language they most appreciate having been translated into English as well as those they would most like to see make the leap. Natasha Perova is the editor of the Russian publishing house Glas, which specializes […]
The 4th Slovo Russian Literature Festival is well underway in London. Running from March 5 to 26 the festival celebrates Russian literature old and new, along with the links between the two. This is well illustrated by lectures being given on March 15 by contemporary novelist Dmitry Bykov (Living Souls, 2011) on Boris Pasternak and […]
At Project Forum’s Salon German writer Michael Krüger has a fascinating account of the numerous bonds that exist between Hungary’s great contemporary writers and Germany, of how virtually all of them speak excellent German (while, in my experience, many speak little or no English at all), and are extremely well-read in German literature. These connections, […]
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