The Prague Centre for Jewish Studies is currently holding its first annual conference: “Jewish Studies in the 21st Century. Prague – Europe – World” (program – mostly in Czech). On Thursday, October 18, I attended the literary segment of the conference at the Clam-Gallasův Palace and under five imposing crystal chandeliers heard various presentations about […]
At Tablet there is an essay on Yiddish poet Simkha-Bunim Shayevitch, (also written as Simcha Bunem Shayevich) whose two poems were found “after the war among the heaps of rubble left in the empty ghetto of Lodz.” The essay was written by Yiddish author Chava Rosenfarb, who died last year, and makes the tragic story […]
The 5th International Bruno Schulz Festival kicks off this week in his hometown of Drohobych, Ukraine (formerly Drohobycz, Poland). Called “The Ark of Bruno Schulz’s Imagination” the festival also has some sideline events in the regional capital of Lviv, including an exhibition of his paintings and graphic works opening September 4. Schulz first exhibited in […]
Ruth Franklin has an excellent article on Gombrowicz at The New Yorker (subscription required), placing the new translation of his diaries in a context that provides the requisite history without weighing the reader down (as most critics seem to) with the obligatory yet incomprehensible need to go on and on about his Polishness the way […]
You can never really say too much about Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz. Not that there isn’t a lot of pure BS and cliché written about Kafka by people who don’t have a clue why he is considered such an important writer – in fact, maybe that’s one more reason why an exhibition putting Kafka […]
The international Theatre Festival of European Regions is underway in Hradec Králové, boasting work by and about Czech and international writers. Read more at the Czech Literature Portal Photos – 1) Alexander Grin’s Morgiana, photo by Petr Neubert, 2) Martin Františák’s The Čapek Case, photo by Bohdan Holomíček Petr Neubert
Just discovered an excellent site devoted to Croatian writers – Critical Mass (Kritična masa) – is available in Croatian, English and German versions, and features both well-known and (for me at least) much lesser-known writers. There are author pages for Daša Drndić, whose novel Trieste was recently published in English and which I’ll have a […]
The American compulsion to write autobiographical novels is a literary dead end Almost exactly a year ago, with the PEN World Voices Festival of international literature taking place I used the occasion of reviewing Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2011 to prop up the Berlin Wall I thought of as separating European and American fiction. […]
The Treatise on Mannequins is a theater piece inspired by Bruno Schulz’s art and writing, using music, visual art and acting to transmit a “world beyond time and space” to the audience. Director Krzysztof Żyliński talked to Czech Position about putting Schulz’s unique sensibility on stage and of the multinational theater company which resembles Schulz’s […]
Two of the most stunning and surreal adaptations of two of the strangest books to come out of Poland have just been restored and released in high definition on DVD. Wojciech Jerzy Has directed the adaptations of Jan Potocki’s novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa in 1965 and of Bruno Schulz’s Sanatorium Under the Sign […]
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