Two Mexican novels, one dealing with highly relevant contemporary subject matter and another first translated into English 50 years after its publication that though from the same country might as well come from a different universe. Another novel receiving its belated debut in English, from the 1930s Berlin underworld and a new Finnish novel about […]
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 German-language literature festival, the Festival Neue Literatur, is taking place in New York City from Feb 19 – 22 with six writers from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland and a theme of Love and Money. Among the featured authors you can see Swiss writer Jonas Lüscher, whose novel Barbarian Spring in an English translation by […]
“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 […]
The 20th century’s darker chapters loom large in this week’s newly published books, with a story of romance set during the Auschwitz trials, a story of trickery and imagination written by one of the victims of Stalin’s Terror from Georgia, and the long-awaited translation of one of Hungary’s legendary works of modernism. This […]
“Here, paradise. There, at home, the law. The woman on the steps is around forty-five years old and J knows her, any time you pass by she’s sure to be standing there; the window panes are painted red so no one can see in, and in the doorway there’s a yellowed poster with a woman […]
Do you ever stay awake nights wondering how to keep your finger on the pulse of contemporary fiction? Of course you do. Well, the answer is actually very simple – read B O D Y’s Saturday European Fiction. For example, The Guardian has a laudatory review of last week’s excerpted novel The Blue Room by […]
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