Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading this week is a story by the great Russian writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky entitled “The Unbitten Elbow”. Translated by Joanne Turnbull, who also provides a brief introduction, the story comes at the recommendation of The PEN Literary Awards. Not much more needs to be said about it than what Turnbull says in […]
PEN America have announced the winners of most, though not all, of this year’s lucrative and sought after literary awards. Of Literalab interest is, above all, the PEN Translation Prize, which goes to Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov for their translation of Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, which was on the Best Translated […]
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 […]
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky has been receiving a lot of critical attention lately due to the NYRB’s publication of his novel The Letter-Killers Club (most recently today in the latest Quarterly Conversation) but it was another of his unpublished, unseen works that recently saw the light at Princeton University. For the 1937 centennial of Alexander Pushkin’s death, […]
There must be something in the air. The Center for the Art of Translation’s Two Lines just came out with its annual anthology, titled “Counterfeits,” including a special section edited by Luc Sante focusing on noir literature. Then, Words Without Borders’ September 2011 issue came out with an issue devoted to an elevated form of […]
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