I have finally begun my ‘Best Books’ list and this year I’m not doing it all at once but am featuring the very best books with reviews and/or links of their own. One of my very favorites this year was McSweeney’s Latin American Crime issue and I reviewed it today in B O D Y. […]
Lit Link Festival will kick off its second year on August 28, holding events in three Croatian cities over three days and bringing together writers, editors and publishers from Croatia with those from Canada, the UK, the US and The Czech Republic. The Czech is possibly the least Czech person I know, namely, me, and […]
Author of Maidenhair and the just released The Light and the Dark, Mikhail Shishkin, wrote an article for English PEN on the Potemkin village of the Winter Olympics, now underway in Sochi at the cost of a mere $50 billion, a sum we can all agree is well worth it for a few weeks of […]
Potemkin had built his legendary villages to be viewed from a distance as the Empress passed by in her carriage. They were meant to be merely glanced at, for effect, like a neon sign or a fashion model, and were created accordingly. But what if the Empress decides to leave the designated path, what if […]
In one version of the story of Samson, although still shorn of his locks and God-given strength, he is able to elude his Philistine captors. Delilah’s perfidy proves only half successful, leaving our hero with a dilemma that the original version neatly does away with. Unable to fight, let alone subdue lions with his bare […]
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