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 […]
PEN America has announced the recipients of this year’s PEN/Heim Translation Fund grants and there’s some great writing from Central and Eastern Europe in the works as well as from the rest of the world. First of all, B O D Y’s own Stephan Delbos along with Tereza Novická won for their translation of The […]
The Prague book fair is underway and I had to take refuge from the Friday crowds of schoolchildren in my local café, which, as it turns out, is crowded with slightly older schoolchildren trying to look even older through chain-smoking and midafternoon glasses of wine. Book World Prague 2015’s Guest of Honor is Egypt and […]
Contemporary European literature will have a night in the spotlight in a multitude (75, as it turns out) of Czech and European cities on Wednesday, May 13, as public readings will be taking place from a wide variety of works and in an assortment of interesting locations for European Literature Night 2015. The project originated […]
Daniela Hodrová began writing A Kingdom of Souls in 1977 but the book, like the rest of her work, didn’t appear until after the fall of the communist regime in 1991. In 2012, Hodrová was awarded the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize, which had previously been awarded to the likes of Philip Roth, Haruki Murakami and […]
Milan Kundera’s first novel in 13 years, The Festival of Insignificance, will be published in Linda Asher’s English translation next month and the New Yorker has just published an excerpt, though it’s being promoted as a short story, “The Apologizer”. The novel was published in Italy in 2013 and then in France and Spain. Bulgarian […]
Hana Andronikova’s novel of a family odyssey beginning in prewar Czechoslovakia and ending up in modern-day North America, with stops in the by turns exotic and horrifying locales of India and Auschwitz won the Czech Magnesia Litera Award in 2002. Now The Sound of the Sundial is finally appearing in English translation edited and adapted […]
An essay in B O D Y on the life of Hans Christian Andersen, a life as bizarre in many ways as anything the writer conjured up in his well-known stories. Here is Rudnicki on Andersen writing his autobiography, The Fairytales of my Life: “Only the title is honest– everything else is made up. He […]
B O D Y’s series of European fiction in translation, Saturday European Fiction, has now reached the end of its second year and so a summing up of sorts is in order. While the vast majority of writers published come from Central and Eastern Europe, year two has seen the geographical range expand a bit […]
Dennis Marks died on April 2 at the age of 66. This interview, conducted in 2012, is being republished in commemoration. Broadcaster, filmmaker and writer Dennis Marks talks to literalab about his recently published book Wandering Jew: The Search for Joseph Roth, in which he follows the geographical trail of the constantly moving writer from […]
literalab 