Hungarian writer and foreign correspondent Sándor Jászberényi has an article (subscriber’s only though I managed to read it free the other day) on the death of a Kurdish Peshmerga fighter he had met and the particular significance of her being a woman. It’s a very powerful story and reminiscent of the writing in his story […]
The growth of European crime writing from outside Scandinavia continues and on June 11 four crime writers from the other corners (and center, actually) of Europe will be in London at the London Review Bookshop to talk about their work and, of course, crime. The event is titled “More Bloody Foreigners: Criminally Good Books From […]
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 […]
Author of Kafka: the Decisive Years, Reiner Stach, has a great though not exactly heartwarming article in the New Statesman on how The Trial seems to relate to many of today’s wonderful extrajudicial tendencies that are coming from the freedom-loving world and that are keeping us so wonderfully safe and secure: “Death by data: how […]
“Pale sky turned into a shabbily painted wall with paint flaking here and there, exposing the texture of old wooden boards. Instead of the white sails he saw the whites of the eyes with threads of broken capillaries. These were the eyes of a madman. He took a breath, greedily, but felt no relief. He […]
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 […]
The 20th International Book Festival Budapest runs from April 18 to 21 with Italy as the country Guest of Honor and Michel Houellebecq as the writer Guest of Honor. Houellebecq’s novel Lanzarote will be published in Hungarian for the occasion. Among the Hungarian writers attending the festival are Noémi Szécsi, György Konrád, László Krasznahorkai and […]
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