The Millions has put out a long and translation-heavy list of books to be published in 2013 in the US. There are quite a few Central and Eastern European novels to look forward to, including a few I have already read, either because they came out in the UK last year or because I took […]
Looking at the list of my top 10 books from 2012, plus an added three from 2011 and two from even earlier, I can’t help noticing that besides the geographical commonality (they’re all by writers from Central and Eastern Europe except the Chilean Carlos Cerda, though even he was writing about being in exile in […]
The latest issue of Absinthe: New European Writing is out including my essay “Rainer Werner Fassbinder: the Balzac of West Germany”. Commemorating the 30th anniversary of Fassbinder’s death at 37 years old I spoke with filmmaker Tom Kalin and president of the Fassbinder Foundation and his former editor Juliane Lorenz about the prolific filmmaker’s legacy […]
New crime writing from the former Eastern Bloc – a list. Words Without Borders has just come out with its (Non-Scandinavian) Crime issue for December. It’s an excellent and varied selection though there is only one short piece from Eastern Europe in an extract from Sergey Kuznetsov’s Butterfly Skin translated by Andrew Bromfield. With that […]
There are many different ways writers can infuse a story or novel with intensity without much in the way of incident or plot. The movement can occur on symbolic or historical levels, they can mine literary history as their character walks around Dublin or devote all their attention to the beauty of the individual sentences […]
Russian literature, theater and art will be in the spotlight in Berlin at the RusImport festival from November 29 to December 9. Highlights include performances of Pyotr Fomenko’s production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters (in Russian with German titles). Fomenko, who passed away at 80 in August was one of the giants of Russian theater. Then, […]
English-speaking expats coming to Prague to write poetry and become famous – yes, you’ve heard that one before and assume that piece of ancient history dates back to the early 1990s. In fact, it stretches just a bit further back, and on November 24 in Prague there will be a series of events commemorating Elizabeth […]
It’s a novel about the early days of the Russian Revolution, the civil war and the famine that ravaged the Soviet Union. The extremes of hunger and poverty are set off against the high living and obscene wealth of those taking advantage of the Soviet government’s New Economic Policy. A story of love and betrayal […]
The Central European Forum takes place in Bratislava from November 15 to 18 and there are a host of writers from the region taking part, including Serbia’s Vladimir Arsenijević, Slovenia’s Drago Jančar (last year’s European Literature Prize winner – more below), Hungary’s György Konrád, Czech Jáchym Topol, Poland’s Andrzej Stasiuk and many more. The conference […]
And Werfel’s friendship with another Prague German writer named Franz From the time his first book of poetry Friend of the World was published to great success and acclaim when he was 21 until his death 34 years later in exile in Los Angeles, Franz Werfel didn’t need to have his name brought to readers’ […]
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