Belarusian writer and investigative journalist Svetlana Alexievich has won the Nobel Prize for literature. There is already a lot of commentary, articles and probably interviews. As Philip Gourevitch says in an article in the New Yorker titled “Nonfiction Wins a Nobel”, Alexievich is “the first full-time, lifelong journalist to win the literature prize.” Read from […]
Kafka’s work has been transformed into many, many things. There are of course film and TV adaptations, graphic novels and the like. I’m sure there’s a Franz Kafka action figure and probably one of a bug with a backdrop of Prague. There was even a porn star (okay, maybe actor – I have no idea […]
Book fairs are a very strange phenomenon. There are many, many kinds of trade fairs but it’s likely that there isn’t a kind as diametrically opposed to the basic function that sustains it as a book fair is to the solitary act of reading. One the one hand all this interaction is vitally necessary – […]
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 […]
Two nominees from Belarus have been put forward for the Nobel Prize in Literature and the names reflect the split between the Lukashenko-friendly, officially sanctioned and its opposite in the country. The official nominee of the Union of Writers of Belarus is Georgi Marchuk, his third time in the running. The head of the official […]
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 […]
The Fall 2011 issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review is out and devoted to the former USSR. There is an excellent selection of essays, fiction and poetry some of which is available online. There is too much good stuff to single out anything, but a couple pieces worth noting are Jason Motlagh’s essay “Dark Days […]
The Belarus blacklist The cultural and media blacklist that the government of Belarus has denied exists and which Russian writer Victor Erofeyev recently referred to being on, seems to be having a growing influence according to this article in Transitions Online. Rock concerts have been cancelled due to imaginary illnesses and paintings by artists such […]
On the Slovak Project Forum’s Salon website Russian novelist Victor Erofeyev laments Russian indifference to the dictators of the world. Whether it’s Qaddafi or Lukashenko, whose regime recently issued a blacklist of international figures not to be mentioned on state-controlled media in Belarus – a list that includes Victor Erofeyev – protests have been virtually […]
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 […]
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