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 […]
“– Do you intend to kill someone? – the woman asked. – Quite the opposite. It’s more likely it will be me. – You have nothing to fear. You still have…. And she named a date, hidden in the depths of the next century, and which flooded me with its gust-like piercing chill, like a […]
This evening in London, Brazilian author of the novel Nowhere People, Paulo Scott, will be appearing at the London Review Bookshop. Published by And Other Stories, the book was translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn and is described on the event host’s site as presenting “the stark contrast between the world of the rich, […]
Throughout August, Literalab will be asking writers, translators and publishers to comment on both the women writers from their own language they most appreciate having been translated into English as well as those they would most like to see make the leap. Natasha Perova is the editor of the Russian publishing house Glas, which specializes […]
In 1928, Imaginist poet Anatoly Mariengof took the daring and risky step of publishing his novel Cynics with the Berlin émigré publishing house Petropolis while himself remaining in The Soviet Union, something which he later had to apologize for. The novel wasn’t published in Russia until 1988. Two years earlier Mariengof had written a novelistic […]
The NEA has announced its literary translation fellowships for 2014 and there is some great-looking work from Central and Eastern Europe being supported as well as some translators whose work has appeared in B O D Y. Among them is Adam Siegel, for his translation from the Russian of Vasilii Golovanov’s The Island: or, A […]
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