“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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
This is the third and last story from Sándor Jászberényi Week in B O D Y and it takes place in Gaza under the benevolent watch of Hamas and the friendly border guards (among other kind souls). It’s called “Somewhere On The Border” and like the others was translated from the Hungarian by M. Henderson […]
All this week B O D Y will be presenting the writing and photography of Sándor Jászberényi, whose short story collection The Devil is a Black Dog is coming out December 9 in an English translation by M. Henderson Ellis courtesy of New Europe Books. Today’s selection is the book’s title story, a chilling piece […]
For the second year running Hungarian László Krasznahorkai has won the Best Translated Book Award for fiction. His novel Seiobo There Below, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, was the winner after he won the 2013 prize for Sátántangó in a translation by George Szirtes. Krasznahorkai came by his publisher New Directions’ offices and gave a short […]
“For this was always the dream of the founding fathers, who had imagined the country as a military base from the start, and it was also the dream of those who believed in the existence of the truly nonexistent country, in their Olympic victories, in their paper cars, in their astronaut’s wave. If a country […]
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 […]
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