‘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. […]
“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, […]
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 […]
The most recent episode of Julia Sherwood’s excellent podcast series on Slovak literature in English is me. I talk about the pros and cons of a virus-emptied center of Prague, the Central European literary sensibility and why I like it and especially about some of the Slovak writers I’ve read, written about and published in […]
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 […]
With the anniversary of the events of 1989 upon us there will be a series of events revolving around contemporary Slovak writing taking place in the UK. Presented under the banner ‘Raising the Velvet Curtain:A journey through contemporary SLOVAK arts’ a series of writers and publications will be presented by translator Julia Sherwood as well […]
“I would have forgotten this story if, about a year later, I hadn’t read a newspaper report about a lorry apprehended by the customs police in Vyšné Nemecké, at the border crossing between Slovakia and Ukraine. It is a place where customs officers frequently come across lorries that carry cheap, Chinese-made copies of branded clothes […]
For the second time an excerpt a novel of one of the pre-eminent Slovak writers, Pavel Vilikovský, has appeared in B O D Y’s Saturday European Fiction, with this excerpt from Fleeting Snow, published by Istros Books in a translation by Julia and Peter Sherwood. This will be the first work published by Vilikovský in […]
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