It is Best Books of the Year time and The Guardian’s Nicholas Lazard has put together a great best paperbacks of 2014 that includes a Literalab Best Book of a couple years back, when it was a paperback too, but, never mind. The book in question is Seven Terrors by Selvedin Avdić. It also includes […]
In an age when we are being bombarded by articles about the end of reading and how today’s uncultivated youth only play violent video games, surf the web, mindlessly tap on the iPads and do other things that I can’t even identify it’s positively heartening to read something that starts off like this: “It would […]
The Leipzig Book Fair is underway as of yesterday, and as always there is a lot of eastward looking literary fare on the agenda, kicking off today with something about Euromaidan that has Yuri Andrukhovych, Andrei Kurkov and writer and singer Irina Karpa among the panel participants (I say “something about Euromaidan” because the program […]
On March 7, 2005 the hero of Selvedin Avdić’s brilliant and captivating novel Seven Terrors decides to get up out of bed after nine months of self-imposed apathy as a result of having been left by his wife. Ready to return to life what he actually returns to is horror. Read the book review in […]
My article on the recent Švankmajer exhibition in Prague has just been published in New Eastern Europe magazine’s Spring 2013 issue. “The Last of the Great Surrealists: Jan Švankmajer: Dimensions of Dialogue – Between Film and Fine Art” is about the Czech artist and filmmaker’s extremely diverse art and film work as well as his […]
Looking at the list of my top 10 books from 2012, plus an added three from 2011 and two from even earlier, I can’t help noticing that besides the geographical commonality (they’re all by writers from Central and Eastern Europe except the Chilean Carlos Cerda, though even he was writing about being in exile in […]
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