“I was born a feral beast. At the time of my birth, I tore my mother apart. It wasn’t on purpose. I think the circumstances caused it. There was a lot of blood in the hospital room. My father, who gutted animals as part of his occupation, couldn’t bear to look.” – from “A Western […]
B O D Y’s latest issue kicks off today and will bring new fiction, poetry, essays and interviews through the month of April. For my part, I will be publishing fiction from Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania with work by Ludovic Bruckstein, Krisztina Tóth, Sándor Jászberényi and Leonie Hodkevitch. The opening work in the issue is […]
The latest issue of The Continental, a magazine I am editing and writing for, is out. The theme of the issue is Noir and includes work from a darker, crime-ridden era of New York City (otherwise known as the good ‘ol days) to a futurist Hungary, Russia, the Czech Republic and elsewhere. Founder of Punk […]
A new magazine has entered the Central European literary firmament, The Continental Literary Magazine, a quarterly print magazine with an excellent website brought out by the Petőfi Cultural Agency. Their focus is bringing Hungarian and Central European writing into English and is led by editor-in-chief Sándor Jászberényi, whose own fiction has been published extensively in […]
B O D Y’s Central European Short Story Issue kicks off today with “Rebi“, a chilling short story by Transylvanian-born Hungarian writer Ádám Bodor in a translation by Peter Sherwood. Bodor’s novel The Sinistra Zone was published by New Directions in a translation by Paul Olchváry. His novel The Birds of Verhovina, translated by Peter […]
Part of Éva Péterfy-Novák’s story of love, deception and betrayal, “Moscow”, was featured in B O D Y’s Hungarian Fiction Week recently and now you can read the second part – “Moscow II” – meaning, lots more deception and betrayal without the love. If you haven’t read the first part, then do that before you […]
All this week B O D Y is featuring newly translated Hungarian fiction, starting with Sándor Jászberényi’s story, “Banana Split“, of a lurid, drunken, drugged night in Cairo that veers into the borders between the hallucinatory and magical realism. Then there’s the excerpt from Vilmos Csányi’s novel The Scent of Perfection, in which a young […]
The author of the fantastic book of short stories The Devil Is A Black Dog, Sándor Jászberényi is appearing in New York tonight at Manhattan’s Hungarian bookstore on the Lower East Side. It is one of the Hungarian writer’s readings in his current US tour. You can read numerous stories from the book in B […]
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 […]
Sándor Jászberényi’s debut story collection came out too late in the year to make it onto any of the prestigious ‘Best of’ lists, many of which were already out before its December publication. Besides, most of the translated writing that made it onto these lists were the books that had already received the most buzz […]
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