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 […]
Writing in the Malay Insider, Erna Mahyuni compares government interference in Russia and Malaysia through the prism of her favorite author Mikhail Bulgakov. Where Putin’s Russia has a new anti-protest law, Malaysia has a peaceful assembly law. And where writers in Stalin’s Soviet Union were pushed towards acceptable themes and subjects to write about, the […]
Banned Books Week was recently celebrated in the US but the Russian Orthodox Church is choosing to mark the occasion with a somewhat different approach. Moscow Patriarchate PR director Vsevolod Chaplin stated that Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez should be banned because they “romanticize perverted passions that […]
One might be tempted to think that literature commonly characterized as absurdist or nihilist would not get much official attention in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Still less would anyone think that it could serve as a springboard to reaching the rarefied heights of literary prizes. Yet, as absurd and potentially nihilistic as it sounds, […]
Michael Scammell came to the Prague book fair with two seemingly related tasks – to speak about his biography of Arthur Koestler, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth Century Skeptic, and to participate in a panel on Index on Censorship, of which he was the founding editor. And while issues of censorship […]
Link: Saudis at Prague book fair: cultural legitimacy for sale On the controversy surrounding Saudi Arabia being the Guest of Honor at Book World Prague 2011 and the Saudi writers that weren’t there, as well as the idea that balancing the “Arab focus” of the event with a broad range of panels and writers was […]
Book World Prague kicked off May 12 at the historic Industrial Palace, site of the Communist Party congress for 41 years during the regime of the same name. That the political landscape has changed considerably is evident even before stepping inside the building. With the opening ceremony approaching, the palace’s imposing art-nouveau façade was matched […]
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 […]
The London Book Fair will take place from April 11 – 16th with a focus on contemporary Russian literature. The lineup includes the presence of 50 of the country’s most prominent writers and literary figures, including the author of the modern classic Pushkin House Andrei Bitov, Ludmila Ulitskaya and Boris Akunin among many others. Paying […]
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 […]
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