UK audiences tired of hearing about the troubled present will have a chance to hear about the troubled history behind the Iron Curtain, with appearances by Albanian and Slovak authors at various locations throughout the week. Oct. 15th sees the book launch of False Apocalypse by Fatos Lubonja and translated from the Albanian by John […]
The shortlist for Slovakia’s largest and most prestigious literary award for prose, the Anasoft litera 2014, has been announced (link in Slovak) and it includes a few Literalab favorites among the 10 books selected out of a total of 194. The shortlisted authors include first timer Uršuľa Kovalyk for Krasojazdkyňa (The Equestrienne). You can read […]
Agnieszka Taborska’s novel Niedokończone życie Phoebe Hicks (The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks) was published in Poland in 2013. Selected excerpts of the completed translation by Ursula Phillips were published in Saturday European Fiction in B O D Y. In extracts from Polish reviews of the novel translated by Julia Sherwood you can read about […]
“When Phoebe Hicks conducted her first séance, when she became the first medium in New England, when her fame began to entice other women to embark on a similar career, no one foresaw, of course, what would distinguish her from her successors. This difference, not so crucial at first glance, fundamentally influenced Phoebe’s story.” From […]
The shortlist for the Rossica Translation Prize 2014 has been announced for the best translation from Russian and it’s a pitched battle between five books. Interestingly, only one of the books’ authors is still alive, as one was quite famously killed in a duel (and that in 1837, so he wouldn’t be showing up at […]
The Missing Slate has published an excerpt from the fantastic novel Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book by Slovak writer Daniela Kapitáňová and translated by Julia Sherwood. The book was published in the UK by Garnett Press in 2011 but has yet to find a US publisher. First published in Slovakia in 2000 to great success the […]
Natasha Perova, editor of Glas New Russian Writing, has a very interesting piece in PEN America on the Russian literary scene in which she discusses the young generation of writers (some of which Glas publishes due to their association with the Debut Prize) and what differentiates them from the writers of the Russian and Soviet […]
“The Romany and their tragicomic lives, the lives of the wheeler-dealers, the inhabitants of settlements and other peculiar characters and figures are the subject matter of the book. The trafficker Ferdy was promised the young and beautiful Sabina as compensation of a debt, but she fled and found the love of her life. The book […]
“This was a symphony inside the sea, yes, inside the sea, for only now did I realize that we had, in fact, come to the seaside, complete with waves and the wind, that everything around was music and that somewhere in the distance a man was swimming, swimming in the waves and in the music, […]
“As far as I’m aware, none of the big shots in the Third Reich was a sadist. All four committed suicide. Hitler and Goebbels did so even before Germany capitulated. Himmler followed when he realized his captors weren’t going to treat him as an important statesman but rather as a criminal, while the hedonist Goering […]
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