I have been expressing my admiration for Central European crime writing since I was practically a baby, but being a baby no one understood what I was saying, so it took until I started Literalab and began writing about it that my admiration took on intelligible form. Since then I have surveyed regional crime fiction […]
The next two weeks of B O D Y’s Sunday European Fiction will be devoted to dark stories of crime and death. First up is the brutal opening of Polish crime writer Mariusz Czubaj’s novel 21:37, just published by Stork Press in a translation by Anna Hyde. This is the award-winning writer’s first book to […]
This week’s Friday Pick in B O D Y: “Open the pages of one of Marek Krajewski’s Eberhard Mock novels and you plunge into a unique and haunting world. It is a world pressed between the oppressive shadows of the two World Wars and seemingly losing its mind because of it; a world of secret […]
Looking at the list of my top 10 books from 2012, plus an added three from 2011 and two from even earlier, I can’t help noticing that besides the geographical commonality (they’re all by writers from Central and Eastern Europe except the Chilean Carlos Cerda, though even he was writing about being in exile in […]
New crime writing from the former Eastern Bloc – a list. Words Without Borders has just come out with its (Non-Scandinavian) Crime issue for December. It’s an excellent and varied selection though there is only one short piece from Eastern Europe in an extract from Sergey Kuznetsov’s Butterfly Skin translated by Andrew Bromfield. With that […]
Norman Davies wrote about Poland as the Heart of Europe. Now it looks like the country is becoming the beating, bloody force of its newest wave of crime fiction For lovers of European crime fiction tired of reading about another glum, divorced, middle-aged Scandinavian police detective who drinks too much for his/her own good, a […]
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