Joris-Karl Huysmans is best known for the representative novel of Decadence, À rebours (Against Nature), and its extreme aesthete protagonist Des Essientes as well as his masterpiece of Satanism, Là-Bas (Down There). But his prolific output included a great variety of no less extreme works, including the newly translated Un Dilemme (A Dilemma). The short […]
Turkish writer Çiler İlhan won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2011 for her short story collection Exile and now the English translation by Ayşegül Deniz Toroser Ateş is being published Istros Books. Besides İlhan, B O D Y has published three other EU Prize for Literature winners: Montenegrin Ognjen Spahić, Serbian Jelena Lengold and […]
The New York Times has an article that uses the occasion and course of the Prague Marathon to venture into Czech dissidence and history as well as some very interesting issues of a renewal of interest in political debate among the younger generation of artists and writers and how this is controversial. The whole article […]
Croatian writer Ivan Sršen’s debut novel Harmattan follows a Nigerian woman imprisoned in Germany for nothing more than entering Europe without the proper documents. Read an excerpt of the account of prison life in Saturday European Fiction in a translation by Marino Buble. Read more Saturday European Fiction
Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu has won the Leipzig Book Award for his trilogy Blinding. The novel originally came out in three separate parts in 1996, 2002 and 2007 respectively, while its outstanding English translation by Sean Cotter was published as a single book by Archipelago Books in 2013. The award’s full name is the “Leipzig […]
“Despite the disasters and misfortunes of our age, one of the pleasures life has given me has been witnessing the appearance of four or five Mexican poets and writers. One of them is Salvador Elizondo.” – Octavio Paz Published in 1965, Salvador Elizondo’s Farabeuf ran counter to the magical realism of Latin American fiction and […]
In 1923 the 40 year-old Franz Kafka met the 25 year-old Dora Diamant at a Jewish vacation camp on the Baltic Sea. They fell in love and decided to move together to Berlin, though Kafka was already suffering from the tuberculosis that would kill him less than a year later. Read an excerpt from Michael […]
The inaugural Cairo Literature Festival is underway in the Egyptian capital and with panels on “Writings of Youth Writers in Central and Eastern Europe” and “Eastern Women Writing between Egypt and Europe”, among others, there are a number of Central European writers present at the festival There actually aren’t any Eastern European writers there, unless […]
“Yet it may be that they can’t see a thing, even their own darkness. So what, Ionesco, did you turn out to be different from everyone else? Or maybe you’re not Ionesco at all, even? These words seemed very unusual to Ionesco. Not even simply strange, but entirely extraordinary.” From “Ionesco and Feodasi” in Moldovan […]
“Your Honor. You hear our stories. You record them. They touch your mind. They touch your intelligence. Perhaps even your imagination. But you’re not one inch closer to us than you were before the trial. Nothing in the world can bridge the gap between your imagination and our experiences.” From Monika Held’s This Place Holds […]
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