In 1923 the 40 year-old Franz Kafka met the 25 year-old Dora Diamant at a Jewish vacation camp on the Baltic Sea. They fell in love and decided to move together to Berlin, though Kafka was already suffering from the tuberculosis that would kill him less than a year later. Read an excerpt from Michael […]
“The Berliner wants to be loved now too, and would gladly trade the familiar admiration of serious folk for the affections of the international idlers’ colony that seeks, in London and especially in Paris, a climate for pleasures high and low. I find this pandering and chasing after people undignified, and anyway it leads to […]
Today’s Authors & Translators featured translator is the celebrated Marian Schwartz (and her authors – we shouldn’t forget the authors, after all) with a fascinating interview. Among other things, she discusses her soon to be published version of Anna Karenina (August 2014) and the intimacy of being able to work personally with an author, something […]
Asymptote’s third anniversary issue is out and, as always, is full of great fiction, poetry, and more than I can list here. Among the highlights are Michael Hofmann’s brilliant essay on Wolfgang Koeppen, a writer who is a thousand times better than most of the names presented as the greats of the second half of […]
If you’ve been reading the Readux website, where I’ve written some book reviews and essays over the past couple years, you already know it as being in touch with the German book scene. With the launch of Readux Books it has become part of that scene, publishing four short literary works three times a year. […]
Russian literature, theater and art will be in the spotlight in Berlin at the RusImport festival from November 29 to December 9. Highlights include performances of Pyotr Fomenko’s production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters (in Russian with German titles). Fomenko, who passed away at 80 in August was one of the giants of Russian theater. Then, […]
A Greek theater company’s production depicting Kafka’s year in Berlin reflects back on a time of financial collapse and growing menace that is frighteningly reminiscent of Europe today. It begins with a society rocked by financial collapse. Anger spills out onto the streets, the extreme left brandishing the hammer and sickle, the resurgent right raging […]
Read Russia I just discovered the Read Russia 2012 site which has everything from video interviews with Olga Slavnikova, Boris Akunin and other well-known writers to a timeline with information on a range of Russian writers – from Andrei Gelasimov, whose Thirst I highly recommend, to some writers who look young enough to be my […]
The mystery at the heart of Jürgen Fauth’s debut novel Kino extends from the smoke-filled cabarets of Weimar Berlin and the era’s legendary silent films to a Brooklyn apartment of two newlyweds and a decrepit drug-filled house in the Hollywood Hills. The transatlantic story comes from a German-born American writer who tells Readux about the […]
When Wilhemina Koblitz, called Mina, comes home after visiting her new husband in a New York hospital, the decadence of Weimar Berlin and the magical possibilities of cinema are likely distant from her preoccupations. The delivery of a pair of metal film canisters changes all that though, to the point that she plunges into a […]
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