“And suddenly I saw comrade Weed get up fast in the moonlight, and I heard a Jesus-fuckin’-Christ immediately muffled by the mat-lined earthen walls. That’s when I made out my friend’s greenish, frozen face, her eyelids lowered, her mouth gasping for air like a fish in an aquarium without water.” An excerpt from the novel […]
At Hungarian Literature Online there is an interview with Matt Henderson Ellis, whose novel Keeping Bedlam at Bay in the Prague Café was recently published by New Europe Books. The interview is titled “Prague kind of lends itself to neurosis,” which has instantly become my automated answer to the perpetual “Why did you move to […]
“If Americans have their dozens, their hundreds of cartoon superheroes or Hollywood starlets with their perfect smiles, if Christians have their God and Muslims have their Allah, if gays have George Michael and girls who just got their first pubes have Lady Gaga, he now has Little Mary. That’s what he’s called her, no matter […]
“The Blake Precept” by Sándor Jászberényi and translated by Matt Henderson Ellis is the first story in Sunday European Fiction in B O D Y. The series will present short stories and novel excerpts in translation from all over Europe, especially of the great writers you probably haven’t heard enough about variety. There will be […]
“Shadow Play” by Slovak writer Peter Karpinský is the first story I brought to Prague literary journal B O D Y as a new contributing editor. The story of a translator of a German poet that reveals itself to be much more than that, is part of Karpinský’s 2010 Anasoft-nominated collection The Holy Non-Assumption. The […]
On February 20 Prague literary journal B O D Y is hosting an evening of the work of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva by translator Mary Jane White. The translations will be accompanied by excerpts from the Russian originals and a scholarly talk about “the soundscape of Kafka’s and Tsvetaeva’s writing. “The evening kicks off with […]
The clock is ticking on the Kickstarter deadline for a project to make a partially animated documentary film about Jan Karski, the Polish resistance hero who tried to bring the Holocaust to light at a time when many people found the reports they were hearing too hard to believe. It’s called Karski & The Lords […]
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 […]
Prague’s online literary journal B O D Y has four short and fantastic pieces by Daniil Kharms translated by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky. They are described as poems but like much of Kharms’ work go beyond typical literary categories, but to see how a writer begins in mid-spit, moves to émigré biography and ends […]
Chtenia’s Summer 2012 issue is out and is devoted entirely to horses, with an essay on the animals’ role in Russian literature as well as translations of equestrian-themed work from Vladimir Mayakovsky, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Vladimir Sorokin and Alexander Kuprin among others. One odd feature of this magazine is that though there is a “Web links […]
literalab 