“I didn’t shine a light there. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bring myself to. I only heard it. You and your friends. I started to see why you were thinking like an insect in the last days. I wasn’t disturbing you. I let the flies and worms and maybe even the rats continue on. […]
The biggest Czech literary awards were given out last night and the Book of the Year went to Radka Denemarková for Hodiny z olova. Best Prose went to the prolific and inimitable Pavla Horáková for Teorie podivnosti (A Theory of Strangeness) while Discovery of the Year went to Probudím se na Šibuji (I Wake Up […]
Hana Andronikova’s novel of a family odyssey beginning in prewar Czechoslovakia and ending up in modern-day North America, with stops in the by turns exotic and horrifying locales of India and Auschwitz won the Czech Magnesia Litera Award in 2002. Now The Sound of the Sundial is finally appearing in English translation edited and adapted […]
A new column at Literalab that will follow-up B O D Y’s Sunday European Fiction starts off with an essay by the translator of this week’s story, Gale A. Kirking. It was a riddle that required my reading two wonderful novels and a collection of short stories to sort out. In dedicating the novel Rustic […]
Czech writer Jiří Hájíček was one of the names on this year’s Finnegan’s List when fellow Czech novelist, graphic novelist and playwright Jaroslav Rudiš selected his 2012 novel Rybí krev (Fish Blood) among the three books to be more widely translated into European languages. In this case more widely is easy to define as the […]
The Czech Magnesia Litera award for the book of the year has gone to Michal Ajvaz for his novel Lucemburská zahrada (The Luxembourg Gardens). The novel is about a teacher in Paris named Paul who enters some kind of fantasy world where an unknown language is spoken when he accidentally types a word he hadn’t […]
Czech writers such as Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal and Josef Škvorecký were an imposing presence in world literature in the last few decades of the 20th century. Today, a new generations of Czech novelists is beginning to make its mark. Coming off a recent appearance at the International Literature Festival Berlin, novelist Tomáš Zmeškal spoke […]
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