2015 Nobel Prize for literature winner Svetlana Alexievich gave her speech (available in a translation by Jamey Gambrell) a couple days ago in Stockholm and like her books it was a mix of her present reflections, witness testimonies as well as her diary entries stretching from 1980 to 1997. Her conclusions aren’t very cheerful, but […]
Sometimes in the world of literature in translation when it rains it pours. So it is that on May 12th it will be pouring a fantastic new selection of books, including a Czech modernist in English for the first time, a surreal Czech novel written during Czechoslovakia’s normalization after the Soviet occupation and a Russian […]
Russian Literature Week begins on Monday Dec. 1 in NYC, consisting of live and online events celebrating the translation of contemporary and classic Russian writing. There will be panel discussions, roundtables and readings with leading writers, translators and publishers as well as film screenings focusing on writers from Pushkin to Prilepin. Many of the participants […]
At the outset I have to admit that I really don’t understand this. The Read Russia Prize, at least on their website, is stated to be for “English translations of Russian literature” and to be given in New York each May. So naturally last weekend in Moscow they announced the winners of the prize, the […]
A Brezhnev era satire of Soviet repression, a book of short stories revolving around the siege of Sarajevo and poems from “Perhaps the most famous Russian poet of the twentieth century. ” In other words, beach reading. Poems of Osip Mandelstam Peter France writes in his foreword: “I have always been conscious that Mandelstam was an […]
In Part I of my interview with Haute Culture Books’ Luis de Miranda the writer and publisher spoke about the uniqueness of his publishing venture. Here the focus is on the books themselves, particularly The Sublimes by Yuri Mamleyev and Flaubert’s Felicity, translated by De Miranda and available as a free download here. Literalab: How […]
B O D Y’s series of European fiction in translation, Saturday European Fiction, kicked off one year ago and has since seen the publication of short stories and novel excerpts from almost every country in Central and Eastern Europe as well as Spain, from authors young and old, living and dead, previously unpublished in English […]
In a publishing world where carving out a unique niche, not to mention publishing unique books, might appear to be increasingly difficult, Haute Culture Books has come along and done just that. With a fascinating selection of fiction that are offerred as exceptional art objects publisher Luis de Miranda is charting a very different course […]
“Shatuny [The Sublimes] was first published in Russia only after the collapse of the Soviet system. Before that, it was published in the West. The reaction in the West was unusual. One American reviewer noted that the world was not ready for such a book. I believe now it is perfectly ready for this book.” […]
He stepped into the bushes to fool around a little. “What can I say about Grigory,” he thought later, “when I don’t even know whether I exist?” From The Sublimes by Yuri Mamleyev, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz. This highly influential cult classic from 1968 has never before been translated into English and […]
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