“…with the index finger of my left hand I write in the grime on the windows on the even-numbered side, ‘Yes Vico! No Vice!’, and with my right arm I sweep up the beauties standing on the odd-numbered side and whisper obscenities in their ears. And when I get bored of this, with both hands […]
“The stout man looked at Israel for the first time since he’d walked into the restaurant. He placed his glass on the table and said, ‘You should go away. You aren’t suited for this country and you don’t like it. Dov loves it. Too bad he’ll come to such a stupid end.’ He gazed into […]
From the time I read “The Sorrows of Idiot Augustus” in Best European Fiction 2012 by Janusz Rudnicki, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft, I was on the lookout for anything by this fantastic writer that would breakthrough the sea of mediocrity of what gets published in English-language fiction. This turned out to be […]
“This was a symphony inside the sea, yes, inside the sea, for only now did I realize that we had, in fact, come to the seaside, complete with waves and the wind, that everything around was music and that somewhere in the distance a man was swimming, swimming in the waves and in the music, […]
Greeks Go Home to Die is Polish writer Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki’s most recently published novel, having been brought out by Znak earlier in 2013. The novel’s main character is the son of a Greek communist guerilla forced to leave for the Eastern Bloc after their defeat in Greece’s civil war. The novel alternates between the boy’s […]
Antonia Lloyd-Jones has been awarded the 2012 Found in Translation Award, the best Polish translator award funded by the Polish Book Institute. The award, which until now was given for a single book translated from Polish, was instead awarded to Lloyd-Jones for “the entirety of her output from the previous year”. And an impressive output […]
Book World Prague roundup Prague’s book fair just came and went and though I missed seeing a lot of the bigger names and featured events I was left with one strong impression that seems highly significant for Central European literature and the region as a whole. It is that Central Europe is fucked – no […]
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