The ninth annual Big Book Prize has gone to Zakhar Prilepin for his novel The Cloister. He beat out Vladimir Sorokin, who came in second with his novel Tellurium, and Vladimir Sharov, who came in third with Return to Egypt. In an article written when the shortlist was announced about six months ago in Publishing […]
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 […]
Russian writer Dmitri Novoselov recently had his English-language debut in B O D Y with the short story “Alevtina”. Now, with the release of the September 2013 Black Markets issue of Words Without Borders he has another work looking back at the chaotic and often absurd decade in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet […]
Here’s what I wrote about the Prague book fair for Publishing Perspectives, covering the significance of Slovakia as the Guest of Honor, poetry being a focus of the fair and various ups and downs facing the Czech book industry, such as the insanely high VAT tax on books and the impending arrival of Amazon. On […]
Czech writer Emil Hakl has a novel Of Kids and Parents and story collection On Flying Objects in English translation. Now Tinge Magazine has an excerpt from The Witch’s Flight, which is being published by Twisted Spoon Press later this year, in a translation by Marek Tomin, who previously translated Hakl’s novel. There is also […]
On February 20 Prague literary journal B O D Y is hosting an evening of the work of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva by translator Mary Jane White. The translations will be accompanied by excerpts from the Russian originals and a scholarly talk about “the soundscape of Kafka’s and Tsvetaeva’s writing. “The evening kicks off with […]
Prague literary journal B O D Y has an unbelievable story from award-winning Czech writer Tomáš Zmeškal. “Vision of Hitler,” translated by Nathan Fields, is a story that is even more unnerving in keeping the reader guessing what kind of story it is than in its ultimate subject matter (though that’s unnerving too). What begins […]
If there is one reason to prefer the boxing to the literary world it is that its heavyweight division is determined by a specific number of pounds (minimum 200, or 90.7 kg.) whereas there are no clear indicators for how heavy a writer has to be to be referred to as a heavyweight. This became […]
Unless a writer is translated into one of the big languages – English, French, German, Spanish – then it becomes very hard to get translated into the smaller languages. Three EU Literary Prize winners – the Czech Republic’s Tomáš Zmeškal, Bulgaria’s Kalin Terziiski and Romania’s Răzvan Rădulescu, talk about the challenges facing writers from smaller languages […]
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