‘You’ll be much more at ease! You’ll be a more interesting person,’ she said about my recent breakup. For a few months I didn’t sleep well. Budapest might be the town with the most ambulances and fire trucks flying by. It must be the most unfortunate metropolis in Europe. Every single siren woke me up. […]
Many people think of the earliest science-fiction as being exclusively British and French, but in fact a couple books about to be published by Jantar Press show that this is far from true. The Science of the Stars by Gustáv Reuss and Newton’s Brain by Jakub Arbes are two early sci-fi books from Slovakia and […]
“It contained the body of a roughly four-year-old boy. That in itself is astounding, since we’re talking about a time frame of about twenty-four thousand years ago, as evidenced by carbon-14 dating of other finds from the same area, but then came Professor Buttler’s reaction, which… his reaction threw us for a loop. You’ve probably […]
“Then there is a veritable panorama of the immediate post-’68 emigration process itself: from the border crossings that, again, resemble neither the dangerous escapes of previous eras nor those that would follow when the regime would seal the border. There are nervous train rides; nostalgic car rides; last looks; and sad goodbyes. There is Vienna, […]
After they finished the rosary, their mother made her usual plea: “Dear God, please bring Karcsi home safely from the war.” “Amen,” Péter and his father said. “No,” Karcsi said, “I don’t want to come home. Instead you should pray that I live a less depraved life in hell than I have in this world.” […]
The fourteenth Prix du livre européen has been awarded to Slovak writer Pavol Rankov for his novel It Happened on the First of September with a prize of €10,000 to be presented in a ceremony in February 2021. The novel was published in a French translation in 2019, while its English translation by Magdalena Mullek […]
It Happened on the First of September (or Some Other Time)A Historical Novel from 1938 to 1968by Pavol RankovTranslated from the Slovak by Magdalena Mullek Reviewed by Michael Stein The 20th century has no shortage of places and times known for name changes and shifts of identity. There was Golden Age Hollywood, where Brooklyn-born Margarita […]
Slovak writer Pavel Vilikovský died Monday at 78. He was one of Slovakia’s most prominent contemporary writers and his profile in English was getting a lift with the recent translation of his novel Fleeting Snow. Previously, his Ever Green Is …: Collected Prose, translated by Charles Sabatos, was his only available work in English from […]
“The place where the executions took place was right under the ramparts of the castle of Matthew III Csák of Trenčín. The condemned were hanged, beheaded, caned, broken on a wheel, quartered, and witches were burned – he was learning the art of torture.” – from “Signs“, which is an excerpt from Dušan Mitana’s final, posthumously […]
“The collection’s cast of characters includes, among others, a child-like dwarf creature who needs to be kept away from water and serves as a litmus paper in the human world, an ex-stripper ceaselessly emitting cigar smoke in emulation of her act of long ago and an old woman whose devoted tending of the apricot tree […]
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