“This isn’t the placelessness of a fellow modernist writer like Kafka, but more closely resembles that of a hyperrealistic painting, where the attention to detail – the glint of light on a bottle, the folds of skin on the figure’s neck – obscure any sign of the surroundings. Felsen isn’t looking at the world through […]
“The way Rankov balances and weaves together the seemingly lighter side of the September 1st story with its darker and more momentous occasions, such as the September 1st, 1939 outbreak of World War II, makes for a highly compelling narrative. By slipping back and forth from fascism to youthful frivolity, the darkness is made darker […]
“And so, with the Holocaust deeply entrenched in my genes, I masturbated every chance I got.” The combination that fuels Siegfried Mortkowitz’s essay in B O D Y “Sex and the Holocaust“, an account not only of his prolific masturbatory career but of his search for his pleasure hunger in his parents experience of the […]
“In the narrow corridors and dark rooms of the once-elegant Hotel Dobray in the sleepy town of Sóbota, in a forgotten land wedged between Hungary and Yugoslavia, human destinies collide like the billiard balls in the hotel’s casino…” So reads the opening to the publisher’s description of Dušan Šarotar’s haunting Billiards at the Hotel Dobray, translated […]
With Prague Book World coming up a series of events are being held in conjunction with the English-language publication of J.R. Pick’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, a tragicomic novel of a thirteen-year-old Czech boy sent to the Terezín ghetto. On Thursday, May 10th at 6:30 pm, Karolinum Press and The Bubny […]
Avrom (Abraham) Sutzkever is known for his powerful, lyrical poetry dealing with the Holocaust that he fought through as a partisan and survived as well other weighty, intense themes in his long life’s body of work. And while this short story has its share of darkness, I think it presents a different side of the […]
From fairy tales retold with some irreverent twists, along with scenes from the Macedonian past, present and unreality to two very different worlds of implicit and explicit violence on either end of Soviet domination – one in Dagestan after the fall of communism, the other in newly occupied Prague in the 50s. Innocence; or, Murder […]
Hana Andronikova’s novel of a family odyssey beginning in prewar Czechoslovakia and ending up in modern-day North America, with stops in the by turns exotic and horrifying locales of India and Auschwitz won the Czech Magnesia Litera Award in 2002. Now The Sound of the Sundial is finally appearing in English translation edited and adapted […]
“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 […]
In Granta’s ongoing Best Untranslated Writers series author of the fantastic East of the West (reviewed on Literalab here) Miroslav Penkov chooses to feature “The Brave Words of Petar Delchev.” Delchev has been a sailor in the Black Sea and more recently been “restoring ruined village houses” and “managing a tailoring factory” all the while […]
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