“And this handsome but utterly stupid young man, who had never had to deny himself an eighth dumpling in his life and was playing at being a committed left-winger, even taking the liberty of professing a kind of ideological solidarity with her, he wasn’t even capable of finding out the most basic information about her […]
The opener of B O D Y’s Winter Issue in 2022 is an amazing short story “The Relay” by the author of Aberrant, Marek Šindelka, translated from the Czech by Graeme Dibble. The story comes from Šindelka’s 2014 collection Mapa Anny (A Map of Ann). Read the story here Read my interview with Šindelka in […]
The Winter Issue of B O D Y will be published throughout February and has an even more European, literature-in-translation focus than usual. There will be fiction, poetry and interviews ranging from Wales to Moldova and Croatia. Tune in tomorrow for a newly translated short story by the author of Aberrant, Marek Šindelka. Read more […]
In commemoration of the death of Czech writer Jan Balabán ten years ago at the age of forty-nine, B O D Y editor Jan Zikmund has reviewed the English version of Balabán’s short story collection Maybe We’re Leaving, translated from the Czech by Charles S. Kraszewski. He writes about how Balabán writes “quiet”, compact stories […]
“I didn’t shine a light there. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bring myself to. I only heard it. You and your friends. I started to see why you were thinking like an insect in the last days. I wasn’t disturbing you. I let the flies and worms and maybe even the rats continue on. […]
With Prague Book World coming up a series of events are being held in conjunction with the English-language publication of J.R. Pick’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, a tragicomic novel of a thirteen-year-old Czech boy sent to the Terezín ghetto. On Thursday, May 10th at 6:30 pm, Karolinum Press and The Bubny […]
The first week of B O D Y’s month-long Czech issue was finished off with a powerful short story, “Cedar and Hammer”, by the award winning writer Jan Balabán, whose literary output is all the more impressive considering he died at the age of 49. There is next to nothing of Balabán’s work available in […]
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 […]
From fairy tales retold with some irreverent twists, along with scenes from the Macedonian past, present and unreality to two very different worlds of implicit and explicit violence on either end of Soviet domination – one in Dagestan after the fall of communism, the other in newly occupied Prague in the 50s. Innocence; or, Murder […]
One of the great Czech modernists Richard Weiner has finally been translated into English, with the novel The Game For Real in a translation by Benjamin Paloff being published by Two Lines Press this week. Read an excerpt in B O D Y here Like Kafka, Weiner never lived to see his writing appreciated, this […]
literalab 