The 2022 Winter Issue of B O D Y nears its end with my review of My Seven Lives by Agneša Kalinová and Jana Juráňová, translated from the Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood. The book is an interview memoir that covers Kalinová’s eventful life and is a fascinating reflection of 20th century history in […]
Have you ever met a wolf? Not alive. Dead? Dead, yes. Does that mean a stuffed wolf? One stuffed, one run over, one killed. So begins the first part of a fantastic interview with László Krasznahorkai in Hungarian Literature Online in which he talks about everything from the disappearance of high culture, historical shifts and […]
Recently, I spoke with Czech writer Marek Šindelka about his novels Aberrant and Material Fatigue, his graphic novel Sv. Barbora, going from being a poet to a prose writer and a number of other issues. You can read the full article in Apofenie magazine here. To get a copy of Aberrant from Twisted Spoon Press […]
The Calvert Journal has compiled a list of 100 books to read from Eastern Europe (also Central Europe) and Central Asia. It’s a fascinating list put together by a wide range of writers, translators, academics coming from a number of different countries and languages besides English. The list includes a number of books and writers […]
Slovak writer Pavel Vilikovský died Monday at 78. He was one of Slovakia’s most prominent contemporary writers and his profile in English was getting a lift with the recent translation of his novel Fleeting Snow. Previously, his Ever Green Is …: Collected Prose, translated by Charles Sabatos, was his only available work in English from […]
“The collection’s cast of characters includes, among others, a child-like dwarf creature who needs to be kept away from water and serves as a litmus paper in the human world, an ex-stripper ceaselessly emitting cigar smoke in emulation of her act of long ago and an old woman whose devoted tending of the apricot tree […]
“There was a time, long, long ago now, when Michal used to be scared of him. Once he was startled awake in the middle of a hot summer’s night, to find his little brother sitting on his bed, motionless, a dark silhouette. Although he couldn’t see his face, he knew that the little one was […]
B O D Y’s Central European Short Story Issue kicks off today with “Rebi“, a chilling short story by Transylvanian-born Hungarian writer Ádám Bodor in a translation by Peter Sherwood. Bodor’s novel The Sinistra Zone was published by New Directions in a translation by Paul Olchváry. His novel The Birds of Verhovina, translated by Peter […]
“I would have forgotten this story if, about a year later, I hadn’t read a newspaper report about a lorry apprehended by the customs police in Vyšné Nemecké, at the border crossing between Slovakia and Ukraine. It is a place where customs officers frequently come across lorries that carry cheap, Chinese-made copies of branded clothes […]
Fifty years ago, Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia, crushing the liberalization of the Prague Spring. What people today know about the consequences of this usually comes from images on the streets of Prague and from the lives of internationally-known Czech intellectuals like Václav Havel and Milan Kundera. This second excerpt from journalist and translator Agneša […]
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