My review of Derek Sayer’s Postcards from Absurdistan, his wide-ranging yet highly uneven account of 20th century Czech culture and the political storms it went through, has been published on Transitions Online. The book covers some very interesting, lesser-known writers, artists and architects as they navigated their way, personally and artistically, through independence, fascism, communism […]
“The chauffeur takes off his blindfold and leaves him in front of an unfamiliar villa by a lake. The door opens to a dim living room. Crackling embers in the fireplace. Some twenty masked people, cloaked in black habits. Latin plainsong…” From Absolution by Aleš Šteger, translated from the Slovene by by by Urška Charney […]
A new selection of some of Kafka’s short prose is being published by Archipelago in a translation by Peter Wortsman. Titled Konundrum: Selected Prose of Franz Kafka, the book comprises stories, journals and letters, as well as including “The Transformation”, more commonly known as “The Metamorphosis”. The book is coming out Oct 18. On Oct […]
One of the great Czech modernists Richard Weiner has finally been translated into English, with the novel The Game For Real in a translation by Benjamin Paloff being published by Two Lines Press this week. Read an excerpt in B O D Y here Like Kafka, Weiner never lived to see his writing appreciated, this […]
Major magazines aren’t usually littered with articles about publishing associate art directors but the past couple days Hollywood stars and other celebrities have had to take a back seat to the man who holds that position at Alfred A. Knopf, designing book jackets for new editions of Kafka, a new translation of Doctor Zhivago, Cortazar’s […]
As noted in the preview of Book World Prague 2014, the 2014 Jiri Theiner Award was given to historian Peter Demetz. Index on Censorship has an article on it though it’s more about the background of the award. (The article was written by Pavel Theiner, the son of the award’s namesake, and he quotes himself […]
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 […]
Author of Kafka: the Decisive Years, Reiner Stach, has a great though not exactly heartwarming article in the New Statesman on how The Trial seems to relate to many of today’s wonderful extrajudicial tendencies that are coming from the freedom-loving world and that are keeping us so wonderfully safe and secure: “Death by data: how […]
1. The Devil’s Workshop by Jáchym Topol (translated by Alex Zucker) Like my favorite book of the year before, my favorite book of 2013 delves into the ultimate horrors that man inflicts on his fellow man, but does so with a surplus of imagination, suspense and humor. Whereas Selvedin […]
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 […]
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