On June 18 New York’s Czech Center will be hosting the release of Heda Margolius Kovály’s novel, Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street. Heda Margolius Kovály (1919-2010) is most famous for her memoir Under A Cruel Star – A Life in Prague 1941–1968 but in 1985 she wrote her crime novel, finally translated this year […]
The growth of European crime writing from outside Scandinavia continues and on June 11 four crime writers from the other corners (and center, actually) of Europe will be in London at the London Review Bookshop to talk about their work and, of course, crime. The event is titled “More Bloody Foreigners: Criminally Good Books From […]
“Roberto Bolaño says a poet can stand anything, and it’s worth writing poetry for that reason alone. I don’t know if Bolaño’s right. Still, he doesn’t say that only certain poets can stand anything, so…maybe if I were a poet, even a mediocre one, I might have experienced Mami’s death another way. All I know […]
“Pale sky turned into a shabbily painted wall with paint flaking here and there, exposing the texture of old wooden boards. Instead of the white sails he saw the whites of the eyes with threads of broken capillaries. These were the eyes of a madman. He took a breath, greedily, but felt no relief. He […]
The next two weeks of B O D Y’s Sunday European Fiction will be devoted to dark stories of crime and death. First up is the brutal opening of Polish crime writer Mariusz Czubaj’s novel 21:37, just published by Stork Press in a translation by Anna Hyde. This is the award-winning writer’s first book to […]
This week’s Friday Pick in B O D Y: “Open the pages of one of Marek Krajewski’s Eberhard Mock novels and you plunge into a unique and haunting world. It is a world pressed between the oppressive shadows of the two World Wars and seemingly losing its mind because of it; a world of secret […]
The 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair kicks off on Wednesday and as the world’s largest book fair will have quite a bit of interest in the way of books, writers and publishing talk and news. Just in terms of Central and Eastern European writers there will be writers such as Russian poet and essayist Olga Martynova, […]
Norman Davies wrote about Poland as the Heart of Europe. Now it looks like the country is becoming the beating, bloody force of its newest wave of crime fiction For lovers of European crime fiction tired of reading about another glum, divorced, middle-aged Scandinavian police detective who drinks too much for his/her own good, a […]
Author Jo Nesbø provides a Czech audience insight into the creative process that has pushed him to the peak of the crime fiction world Norwegian crime fiction writer Jo Nesbø made his first trip to Prague this April 13 for the publication of the Czech version of his latest in the Harry Hole mystery series, […]
Are English and American writers missing an opportunity to write political novels? And Jo Nesbø talking about the ethics of a fictional treatment of last year’s mass killing in Norway. Last week was rough for novelists. First their ability to write philosophical novels was questioned, now they are being taken to task for their inability […]
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