“Reaching this point, Rabbi Nachman felt the urge to make a pause, not even he knew why, and lifting his eyes from the book, he saw on the threshold of the open door the tall thin figure of the wayfarer with the tangled white beard, the clear blue eyes sunken in their sockets, the long […]
“There was fascism, there was communism and the bugbears of communism. Now, there is, supposedly, none of that, and all the filth of those times has been swept under the carpet.” – from Canzone di Guerra by Daša Drndić, translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth. B O D Y’s Winter Issue rolls on with […]
The latest fiction offering in B O D Y’s Spring Issue comes from the debut novel of Slovene writer Mitja Čander, Blind Man, translated by Rawley Grau. Čander is no stranger to the literary world, having been a longtime figure as an editor, publisher, playwright, screenwriter and critic as well as candidate for national chess […]
The Spring Issue of B O D Y kicks off today with some poetry. I’ll have some fiction from Russia by Andrey Filimonov translated by Richard Coombes and Anne O. Fisher followed by a discussion the two translators had with Filimonov about his work, his influences, growing up in Siberia, Slavic word games and where […]
For the occassion of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Istros Books is publishing Ludovic Bruckstein’s collection With an Unopened Umbrella in the Pouring Rain, translated from the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth. Bookanista has an excerpt from the novel here as well as a review of a pair of novellas published by Istros as The Trap. There […]
The Central European Short Story Issue kicks off its second week with a short story that harks back to Prague’s more fun and disreputable days of the early 90s. “That afternoon he took a taxi ride, bought a second-hand violin on the street of Alchemists, visited museums, had lunch and drank the best Austrian wine, […]
“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 […]
Written in 1980, Dogs and Others, by Serbian writer Biljana Jovanović and translated into English by John K. Cox, shows life in 1960’s socialist Belgrade through a very particular yet representative family. Madness, suicide and the first openly lesbian character in the country’s literature are just part of the bohemian milieu and experimental writing. Read […]
Istros Books has a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to translate and publish Under Pressure, a short story collection by war veteran and writer, Faruk Šehić. Šehić’s debut novel, Quiet Flows the Una, published in Will Firth’s English translation by Istros, won the 2013 EU Prize for Literature. The book was first published in Bosnian […]
The world lost a major writer when Daša Drndić passed away earlier this year. The author of Trieste, Belladonna and Leica Format, all available in English translation, is still seeing her work coming out in English with the soon-to-be-published Doppelgänger coming out from Istros Books in a translation by Celia Hawkesworth and Susan Curtis. Read […]
literalab 