An epistolary novel set in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, a psychological thriller of love and assassination, Ricarda Huch’s work is virtually unknown in the english-speaking world despite her high-standing in the Germany of her time – Thomas Mann called her the “First Lady of Europe” while Hitler and Goebbels sent her […]
The Pushkin House Russian Book Prize shortlist for 2015 has been announced and has some very interesting titles. It includes Polish writer Jacek Hugo-Bader’s Kolyma Diaries: A Journey into Russia’s Haunted Hinterland, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. You can read translations of Polish prose and poetry by Lloyd-Jones in B O D Y. The Zhivago Affair: […]
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 […]
“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 […]
“The Berliner wants to be loved now too, and would gladly trade the familiar admiration of serious folk for the affections of the international idlers’ colony that seeks, in London and especially in Paris, a climate for pleasures high and low. I find this pandering and chasing after people undignified, and anyway it leads to […]
Serbian writer Jelena Lengold, author of the short story collection Fairground Magician, is appearing at Europe House in London on Friday, February 21 for an evening of conversation. The collection was published by Istros Books in 2013 in a translation by Celia Hawkesworth, after having won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2011. Read […]
From a book of essays that charts everything from the “listlessness of Central Europe to the ennui of the Low Countries” to a series of books that covers pretty much the rest of the bases by dealing with “Life and death—under water, and in the sky. Sinister picnics. Hellish cafeterias.” (If there’s anything else in […]
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