Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu has won the Leipzig Book Award for his trilogy Blinding. The novel originally came out in three separate parts in 1996, 2002 and 2007 respectively, while its outstanding English translation by Sean Cotter was published as a single book by Archipelago Books in 2013. The award’s full name is the “Leipzig […]
From November 14 through 17 the Slovak capital of Bratislava will host Bibliotéka, the country’s book fair, featuring an array of Slovak and international writers and publishers such as Michal Hvorecký, Péter Esterházy and Pavel Vilikovský. But the name which has the whole city waiting with bated breath – no, the whole country – is […]
Just discovered an excellent site devoted to Croatian writers – Critical Mass (Kritična masa) – is available in Croatian, English and German versions, and features both well-known and (for me at least) much lesser-known writers. There are author pages for Daša Drndić, whose novel Trieste was recently published in English and which I’ll have a […]
In Eurozine, Slavenka Drakulić has a far-reaching exploration of European identity by looking at two very different forms of change taking place in Italy. On the one hand, there is the influx of refugee immigrants coming to the island of Lampedusa and the southern coastal city of Bari. It is a story of incredible privations […]
A selection of fiction from the Czech Republic to Russia noted by critics in the year’s “Best of” lists The “Best of” lists that come out at the end of the year tend to confirm received opinion for the most part and so it is not a big surprise that translated fiction does not make […]
literalab 