The Literary Saloon pointed my attention to a profile of Hispabooks in El Pais’s Trans-Iberian. The Madrid-based publisher has already put out a fantastic selection of new Spanish writers, including the award-winning Marcos Giralt Torrente’s Paris, which was excerpted in B O D Y earlier this year. Unfortunately, the article brings in the tired “read […]
The two novellas and five short stories that make up The Bridge Over the Neroch: And Other Works comprise the rest of the writing left to us by the author of Summer in Baden-Baden, Leonid Tsypkin. New Directions is bringing the book out in February 2013 and you can read my review in the 2nd […]
Where to look to discover new writers? At MFA programs, readings, literary magazines? Wrong. Israeli daily Haaretz tells the remarkable story of parking attendant turned writer Leonid Pekarovsky (or Russian art critic and intellectual turned parking lot attendant turned writer). Having emigrated from Kiev to Israel, Pekarovsky discovered that his intellectual pursuits back home meant […]
With evening falling and word of Václav Havel’s death already spread throughout the city, a line was forming in front of Prague’s Memorial of the student demonstrations of November 17th. Although the memorial itself is under cover people stood waiting outside under the winter’s first snow flurries to pay tribute to a man whose legacy […]
Evading intensifying KGB searches members of the Belarus Free Theatre managed to cross the Belarusian border and have arrived in New York to perform in the Under the Radar international alternative festival. “We’ve truly been under the radar, in hiding in a real detective story,” group co-founder Natalia Koliada told the New York Times in […]
The most recent literalab post recounted the arrest and detention of Belarus Free Theatre director Natalia Koliada and the fact that she and her husband, Nikolai Khalezhin, subsequently went into hiding. Although updates on their whereabouts have been virtually non-existent I will pass on any information I discover. In the meantime you can support their […]
My original idea was to write a series of posts about writing and theater in Belarus the week following the rigged elections to show the obstacles facing free expression in Lukashenko’s authoritarian regime. Although I felt that the political dimension of Belarusian writing is often overemphasized at the expense of literary qualities, it still seemed […]
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