“You leave Fitting Room no. 5 and drift tiredly down the dark corridor, and in your reflection you watch the shining of your shimmery scales beneath the dim gleam of the neon lights. A hazy sign high on the walls at the side leads you on toward the luxurious center. You travel like an illuminated […]
From the time I read “The Sorrows of Idiot Augustus” in Best European Fiction 2012 by Janusz Rudnicki, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft, I was on the lookout for anything by this fantastic writer that would breakthrough the sea of mediocrity of what gets published in English-language fiction. This turned out to be […]
“He’ll carry the wreath, and Maria and Anna will walk after him. He said it as if he didn’t have any idea what he was supposed to do. Like he’s going to carry the wreath on his back and walk around the house. Cruel. It seems cruel to bother children with that kind of stupidity; […]
On January 9, historian Timothy Snyder and director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage David Marwell will meet at the museum in New York to discuss the unbelievable story of Witold Pilecki. Known as the only man to voluntarily go to Auschwitz to be able to provide a first-hand account of the atrocities taking place […]
Clowns, volcanoes, love, jealousy, grief, birds and disease are the elements that make up Janusz Rudnicki’s haunting short story The beginning of Dante’s Divine Comedy sees the poet “halfway along life’s path” at 35 years old and lost in a dark wood. The beginning of “The Sorrows of Idiot Augustus” by Poland’s Janusz Rudnicki finds […]
I should admit from the outset that I haven’t always liked the short story form. When I first began reading with any dedication I had the impression that novels conjured entire worlds while short stories were content with slices of life. What’s more, the slice-of-life sensibility appeals so directly to verisimilitude that a story about […]
An article on Aleksandar Hemon and Nicole Krauss presenting Dalkey’s Best European Fiction 2012, on the good old translation conundrum, on old men no longer reading fiction (from a very good source) and another kind of cut in the publishing industry besides job cuts. Read the full article at Czech Position
The varied world of Czech literature, past and present, contains a vast store of work virtually unknown outside of the Czech Republic Nothing lasts forever, and the recent losses of Václav Havel and Josef Škvorecký emphasize the finitude of what was probably the greatest generation of Czech writers. Fortunately, there are numerous younger writers whose […]
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