Russian writer Aleksei Lukyanov begins his story “Entwives” with a reference to the aforementioned entwives from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the female tree creatures lost to their male tree-creature counterparts. But then the story takes a precipitous turn into pretty rough Russian schoolyard banter before taking a few darker a very […]
Two short pieces by Daniil Kharms from the mid-1930’s translated by Alexander Cigale, one about an invasive cuckoo bird among other things, the other miraculously seeming to foreshadow every hipster’s worst nightmare scenario. You can also go back to the last installment of Saturday European Fiction for more Kharms. Read more Saturday European Fiction
“And so, it once happened that Nikolay Ivanovich found himself in Hotel Europe, in their restaurant. Nikolay Ivanovich sits at his table, and the table over from him is occupied by some foreigners, and they’re gobbling up apples. And that’s when Nikolay Ivanovich said to himself: ‘A curious thing,’ Nikolay Ivanovich said to himself, […]
In 2015 a new and far from typical star arrived on the Russian literary scene. Guzel Yakhina won multiple literary prizes for her debut novel Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes, including the Big Book Award and the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Prize. Yakhina was born in Kazan, Tatarstan (a semi-autonomous Russian republic) and her novel tells the […]
Alisa Ganieva will be in New York City on Thursday, June 18 for a launch of her newly translated novel The Mountain and the Wall. The event is sponsored by Read Russia and will involve a discussion between the author and translator, publisher and academic Ronald Meyer at Book Culture on 112th St. The novel […]
From fairy tales retold with some irreverent twists, along with scenes from the Macedonian past, present and unreality to two very different worlds of implicit and explicit violence on either end of Soviet domination – one in Dagestan after the fall of communism, the other in newly occupied Prague in the 50s. Innocence; or, Murder […]
Sometimes in the world of literature in translation when it rains it pours. So it is that on May 12th it will be pouring a fantastic new selection of books, including a Czech modernist in English for the first time, a surreal Czech novel written during Czechoslovakia’s normalization after the Soviet occupation and a Russian […]
“Yet it may be that they can’t see a thing, even their own darkness. So what, Ionesco, did you turn out to be different from everyone else? Or maybe you’re not Ionesco at all, even? These words seemed very unusual to Ionesco. Not even simply strange, but entirely extraordinary.” From “Ionesco and Feodasi” in Moldovan […]
“Prilepin has not merely turned inside out the consciousness of the entire post-Perestroika generation of politicized young Russians and laid it bare, but he also, in large part, predicted the patterns of development of radical political groups and the government’s strategy in combatting them.” This is from Alexei Navalny’s introduction to Sankya by Zakhar Prilepin, […]
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 […]
