Books on film Adapting literature to cinema usually does not make for a pretty story. There are any number of reasons. Some novels are inherently unfilmable. Others are dumbed down and commercialized to the point that traces of the original become nearly impossible to detect. Sometimes a talented, even brilliant director, say Orson Welles, takes […]
The day after the ceremony in which he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in Prague, Irish novelist John Banville came to the Kafka Society’s basement haunts and, against the backdrop of Kafka’s old library, spoke about his work, murderers (and looking like a murderer), Nabokov, and a number of other things. Below is the […]
Polish writer Bruno Schulz continues to gain some of the acknowledgement he failed to obtain during his tragically shortened life. Earlier this month a festival devoted to Schulz took place in Lublin in Eastern Poland, not far from his native Drohobycz (today Drohobych, Ukraine). The festival is called Bruno4ever, a title which, if Schulz were […]
The 8th Annual Festival of European Literature starts on November 15 in New York, with this year’s title being Crime Scene: Europe. Noir fiction writers participating include Zygmunt Miłoszewski (Poland), Ana Maria Sandu (Romania), Stefan Slupetzky (Austria), José Carlos Somoza (Spain), Caryl Férey (France), Jan Costin Wagner (Germany) and Dan Fesperman (US). “Europe is in […]
Having come to his full powers as a writer whose novels and stories could not be published during Stalin’s growing stranglehold on power, whose plays could almost never hope to be performed, Bulgakov is now a hot commodity in the entertainment world. The latest news is that Stone Village Pictures – makers of The Human […]
It seems Russian book banning mania has not abated since I last wrote about the subject not all that long ago. The latest target – novelist Boris Akunin, author of the successful Erast Fandorin detective series among others. On October 27 the news got out that the senior investigator of the Moscow branch of the […]
Writers from Germany to Bulgaria take a literary boat trip down the Danube and attempt to explore issues of European identity, the chaotic state of the world and the precarious situation of freelance writers. The Danube runs almost 3,000 kilometers from the Black Forest in Germany all the way to the Black Sea, and has […]
Irish novelist John Banville was presented the 11th annual Franz Kafka Prize on Tuesday by the Franz Kafka Society, with various Czech dignitaries in attendance. The ceremony took place in Prague’s Old Town Hall, and the internationally celebrated writer, critic and author of a book on Prague spoke about how he imagined the proceedings would […]
Translator Alex Zucker will be presenting and reading from his translation of Petra Hůlová’s debut novel All This Belongs to Me (Paměť mojí babičce) as part of the European Book Club at 7:00 p.m. on October 26, at the Czech Center in New York. While a guest at the 2011 Prague Writer’s Festival Hůlová did […]
There I was, taking a perfectly innocent stroll through the woods, passing an overturned tree stump I had seen a thousand times before when I made out a shadowy figure lingering behind it, standing there suspiciously still. He looked Russian, though it was hard to tell because it was foggy and he had such a […]
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