Lit Link Festival will kick off its second year on August 28, holding events in three Croatian cities over three days and bringing together writers, editors and publishers from Croatia with those from Canada, the UK, the US and The Czech Republic. The Czech is possibly the least Czech person I know, namely, me, and […]
A Brezhnev era satire of Soviet repression, a book of short stories revolving around the siege of Sarajevo and poems from “Perhaps the most famous Russian poet of the twentieth century. ” In other words, beach reading. Poems of Osip Mandelstam Peter France writes in his foreword: “I have always been conscious that Mandelstam was an […]
The growth of European crime writing from outside Scandinavia continues and on June 11 four crime writers from the other corners (and center, actually) of Europe will be in London at the London Review Bookshop to talk about their work and, of course, crime. The event is titled “More Bloody Foreigners: Criminally Good Books From […]
Two novelists, among many others – not to mention a host of non-novelists – have thrown in their two cents on the situation in Ukraine from two very different points of view. Natalka Sniadanko is a Ukrainian writer and translator (of Kafka, Czesław Miłosz, Olga Tokarczuk and Zbigniew Herbert among others). Writing in the New […]
There is a some environmental and personal catastrophe in Kazakhstan and a story in interwar Central Europe ending in a journey to the concentration camps. Then a very different journey from Moldova pointing towards the promised land of Italy, some Ottoman intrigue and conversations with Orhan Pamuk, and three works by Chekhov. […]
Serbian writer Jelena Lengold, author of the short story collection Fairground Magician, is appearing at Europe House in London on Friday, February 21 for an evening of conversation. The collection was published by Istros Books in 2013 in a translation by Celia Hawkesworth, after having won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2011. Read […]
“Have I told you the story about the guy who butchered hogs?” “Which guy?” “The one who was in the Foreign Legion. Have I told you that one?” “Is it for real?” And so starts the very short story, “One Big Mess” by Croatian writer and author of Our Man in Iraq Robert Perišić in […]
“About Death itself he knew everything: it would be difficult to find someone who could outdo him in his knowledge of its causes and effects, its kinds and types. Perhaps he would not excel at questions of its usefulness: not one of his teachers or rulers had instructed him about such secrets because the question […]
“All courses start in the fall, when a man has to start something, turn things around, survive. It’s always great in the beginning, but there’s a point with people like him, people who never make a second payment for their German, karate, creative writing, yoga…” From a short prose piece – “All Courses Start In […]
I remember the first time I saw a Romanian movie as a teenager, it was from the Ceaușescu era of course, just as I was from the Reagan one. In fact, my entire teenage years were confined within the great communicator’s two terms in office. Not that I’d compare myself to a victim of a […]
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