Joris-Karl Huysmans is best known for the representative novel of Decadence, À rebours (Against Nature), and its extreme aesthete protagonist Des Essientes as well as his masterpiece of Satanism, Là-Bas (Down There). But his prolific output included a great variety of no less extreme works, including the newly translated Un Dilemme (A Dilemma). The short […]
There are only a few days left to apply for this year’s Sozopol Fiction Seminars that will take place on the Black Sea coastal town of Sozopol from June 18-22. The application deadline is March 20. The Elizabeth Kostova Foundation’s program offers full scholarships for 10 writers to come to Bulgaria – five English-speaking, five […]
Croatian writer Ivan Sršen’s debut novel Harmattan follows a Nigerian woman imprisoned in Germany for nothing more than entering Europe without the proper documents. Read an excerpt of the account of prison life in Saturday European Fiction in a translation by Marino Buble. Read more Saturday European Fiction
“Despite the disasters and misfortunes of our age, one of the pleasures life has given me has been witnessing the appearance of four or five Mexican poets and writers. One of them is Salvador Elizondo.” – Octavio Paz Published in 1965, Salvador Elizondo’s Farabeuf ran counter to the magical realism of Latin American fiction and […]
Two Mexican novels, one dealing with highly relevant contemporary subject matter and another first translated into English 50 years after its publication that though from the same country might as well come from a different universe. Another novel receiving its belated debut in English, from the 1930s Berlin underworld and a new Finnish novel about […]
“Yet it may be that they can’t see a thing, even their own darkness. So what, Ionesco, did you turn out to be different from everyone else? Or maybe you’re not Ionesco at all, even? These words seemed very unusual to Ionesco. Not even simply strange, but entirely extraordinary.” From “Ionesco and Feodasi” in Moldovan […]
“Your Honor. You hear our stories. You record them. They touch your mind. They touch your intelligence. Perhaps even your imagination. But you’re not one inch closer to us than you were before the trial. Nothing in the world can bridge the gap between your imagination and our experiences.” From Monika Held’s This Place Holds […]
The 20th century’s darker chapters loom large in this week’s newly published books, with a story of romance set during the Auschwitz trials, a story of trickery and imagination written by one of the victims of Stalin’s Terror from Georgia, and the long-awaited translation of one of Hungary’s legendary works of modernism. This […]
“If she could only hide somewhere now, like a small animal in a hole. She remembered the day she decided she wouldn’t play anymore. She had her hands over her belly, as she tried to protect the baby while he hit her. The famous and world-renowned composer. If she’d only dared to open her mouth. […]
“Beginning in reverie and a nostalgic glance back at the protagonist’s early life and dreams, Jana Juráňová’s Ilona. My Life with the Bard subtly shifts to a tone of gentle and increasingly piercing irony towards Slovakia’s national poet, with moments of almost nightmarish confinement, as it becomes clear that there was a heartlessness at the […]
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