The story in Saturday European Fiction this week – “Slow Walking Course” by Uršuľa Kovalyk – contained the same disturbing and darkly humorous combination of the humdrum every day and the magically surreal that I found so striking in the first story of hers I read – “Mrs. Agnes’s Bathroom.” That story was included in […]
“Perhaps he’s gone crazy, it occurs to me. Or have I gone crazy? The inspector inside me applies her most powerful lever – my conscience – but I can no longer weep. Even my tears are stuck somewhere beneath my eyelids. I’ve been living on the trolleybus for two weeks now. The passengers are peculiar. […]
Greeks Go Home To Die is the latest novel published by Polish writer Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki, the book having been brought out by Znak in June 2013. An excerpt of the novel translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood appeared in B O D Y’s Sunday European Fiction and as a follow up here is a transcript […]
Greeks Go Home to Die is Polish writer Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki’s most recently published novel, having been brought out by Znak earlier in 2013. The novel’s main character is the son of a Greek communist guerilla forced to leave for the Eastern Bloc after their defeat in Greece’s civil war. The novel alternates between the boy’s […]
An excerpt from Balla’s novella In the Name of the Father was this week’s Sunday European Fiction at B O D Y and here is an interview conducted by Jitka Rožňová with the writer for the forthcoming issue of Slovakia’s Knižná revue (The Book Review): To receive so many awards for a single book (In the […]
“Of all the people I knew in those days he was the only one who could switch off, sit down and just stay seated, puffing away without – I’m quite sure – a thought in his head. He would just sit there, immersed in emptiness. Not that he had a clue about Buddhism.” From an […]
Translator Alex Zucker was in Prague to speak about his translation of Jáchym Topol’s novel The Devil’s Workshop (Chladnou Zemí), which will be published in June 2013 as well as his previous Topol translation City Sister Silver. To give an idea of the difficulties presented in translating Vladislav Vančura’s 1931 modernist masterpiece Markéta Lazarová, which […]
Balla (Vladimír Balla) has won Slovakia’s biggest literary prize for his novella In the Name of the Father. In its seventh year the Anasoft litera comes with an award of €10,000. Previous winners include Pavel Vilikovský, Marek Vadas, Milan Zelinka, Alta Vášová, Stanislav Rakús and Monika Kompaníková. Hopefully, the award will give Balla a promotional […]
At Tablet there is an essay on Yiddish poet Simkha-Bunim Shayevitch, (also written as Simcha Bunem Shayevich) whose two poems were found “after the war among the heaps of rubble left in the empty ghetto of Lodz.” The essay was written by Yiddish author Chava Rosenfarb, who died last year, and makes the tragic story […]
There are some new magazines out with Central European content. Two Lines: Passageways has Julia Sherwood’s translation of an extract from Slovak writer Ján Rozner’s Seven Days to the Funeral as well as a fantastic selection of Russian poets such as Arseny Tarkovsky (the filmmaker’s father), Velmir Khlebnikov and contemporary Shamshad Abdullaev. To read a […]
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