During the Second World War Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti was subject to forced labor because he was Jewish and was called up three times. The final time came on May 20, 1944, when he was sent to a German labor camp in Bor, Serbia, where he worked in the copper mines. On May 19, the […]
At Hungarian Literature Online (HLO) there is a very thorough summary of the efforts by translator Tim Wilkinson and Contra Mundum Press to bring Hungarian writer Miklós Szentkuthy (1908–1988) into the international prominence many feel he deserves. The latest Szentkuthy work published in English is his Marginalia on Casanova, with Towards the One & Only […]
At Hungarian Literature Online there is an interview with Matt Henderson Ellis, whose novel Keeping Bedlam at Bay in the Prague Café was recently published by New Europe Books. The interview is titled “Prague kind of lends itself to neurosis,” which has instantly become my automated answer to the perpetual “Why did you move to […]
The Millions’ Year in Reading series is in full swing and frankly, what the majority of these writers and critics seem to have been reading in 2012 just reminds me that I read in an entirely different universe than they do. So many of the selections sound so quaint and dull, Romance novels with a […]
Prague’s online literary journal B O D Y has four short and fantastic pieces by Daniil Kharms translated by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky. They are described as poems but like much of Kharms’ work go beyond typical literary categories, but to see how a writer begins in mid-spit, moves to émigré biography and ends […]
Hungarian Literature Online has published the introduction to Miklós Szentkuthy’s Marginalia on Casanova, which is being published in an English translation by Tim Wilkinson by the Contra Mundum Press in September. Szentkuthy’s obscurity in the English-speaking and reading world makes even some of Central Europe’s most obscure writers seems like the stars of their own […]
B O D Y A new Prague-based international literary magazine has just come out. B O D Y is run by editors Joshua Mensch, Christopher Crawford, Stephan Delbos and contains a selection of poetry, fiction and an essay on three neglected American women poets from the early 20th century by poet, writer and translator Richard […]
I have already written a little bit about Polish fantasy writing in reviewing The Polish Book of Monsters, so now here is something from the fantastical side of the Czech Republic and Hungary. Czech monsters At the Czech Literature portal there is a long outline of Czech fantasy, dating back to its pre-1989 origins and […]
The second part of an article in Berlin’s Readux on the Literature in Flux program and the river it took place on. Stories of piracy, swimming feats, drowning and love – some true, some fictional and some a combination of the two. What they all have in common is The Danube. Continue Reading Photo – […]
On Hungarian Literature Online a review of György Spiró’s yet to be translated Spring Exhibition, a novel whose main character misses out on the 1956 uprising due to a hemorrhoid operation. There is also an interview with the author where he talks about the difficulty of dealing with anachronistic communist lingo and his memories of […]
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