It begins in Prague’s Old Town of the well-known cobblestone, labyrinthine streets, where Franz Kafka was born and raised, but in this case refers more to the city of crystal ashtrays, miniature stone Golems, Kafka tee-shirts and guided tours. As the editors of “Kafkaesque: Stories Inspired by Franz Kafka” point out in their introduction, “we […]
Banned Books Week was recently celebrated in the US but the Russian Orthodox Church is choosing to mark the occasion with a somewhat different approach. Moscow Patriarchate PR director Vsevolod Chaplin stated that Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez should be banned because they “romanticize perverted passions that […]
Earlier this year it was announced that Irish writer John Banville was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize. Now it is being a bit coy and imprecise of the Kafka Society to only say that Banville is coming to Prague at the end of October to accept the award without, for example, naming the actual day. […]
“But who would Joyce be if he wrote not in English but, say, in Albanian?” It is not only the existence of Central Europe that can be called into question apparently, but of Europe itself. “Perhaps Europe as a single entity actually does not exist after all,” begins a lecture presented at last month’s European […]
The first installment of literalab: Best Reads, in which sometimes neglected books from and about Central and Eastern Europe are put in the spotlight they deserve .. The Degaev Affair That reality is stranger than fiction must once have been an original and thought-provoking point. Today, it is taken for granted, a cliché even, leaving […]
Czech writers such as Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal and Josef Škvorecký were an imposing presence in world literature in the last few decades of the 20th century. Today, a new generations of Czech novelists is beginning to make its mark. Coming off a recent appearance at the International Literature Festival Berlin, novelist Tomáš Zmeškal spoke […]
There are at least a couple of ways to read novels that come in a series – as stand-alone books with similar characters and themes, or as a single novel broken up for practical reasons. In the case of Andrey Kurkov’s tale of the misadventures of failed writer Viktor Zolotaryov and his pet penguin Misha […]
A New York gallery presents an exhibition of art inspired by the concepts behind Milan Kundera’s 1995 novel “Slowness” The writing of Milan Kundera has had considerable influence in the world of literature since his first novel “The Joke” was published to international acclaim in 1967. Kundera has also written extensively on music, film and […]
An innovative animated film shows often dark passages of Czech history through the eyes of a small-town stationmaster At a press conference presenting the film “Alois Nebel,” Jaroslav Rudiš recounted how he and co-writer Jaromír 99 (the pen name of Jaromír Švejdík) came up with the original idea for the comic on an autumn evening […]
Ten years after it came into print in English I finally overcame my reluctance to read Andrey Kurkov’s Death and the Penguin. So what was holding me back all this time? Honestly it was some of the reviews I read – the ones which talked about how the book provided a convincing portrait of post-Soviet […]
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