“Beginning in reverie and a nostalgic glance back at the protagonist’s early life and dreams, Jana Juráňová’s Ilona. My Life with the Bard subtly shifts to a tone of gentle and increasingly piercing irony towards Slovakia’s national poet, with moments of almost nightmarish confinement, as it becomes clear that there was a heartlessness at the […]
UK audiences tired of hearing about the troubled present will have a chance to hear about the troubled history behind the Iron Curtain, with appearances by Albanian and Slovak authors at various locations throughout the week. Oct. 15th sees the book launch of False Apocalypse by Fatos Lubonja and translated from the Albanian by John […]
The recent centennial of Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal and the publication of Harlequin’s Millions in a translation by Stacey Knecht is the impetus for a number of Hrabal-based events coming up this week. On May 6, Knecht will be in conversation with writer Caleb Crain at 192 Books in New York City. And NYRB and […]
Literature is filled with requests for cigarettes, but I doubt there are many that resemble the one found in Ondrej Štefánik’s “To Sacrifice Yourself For Someone Else”: “Do you have a smoke?” I hear a squeaky voice from somewhere. It’s not the voice in my head. I shiver. I look around. Not a soul. “So? […]
The shortlist for Slovakia’s largest and most prestigious literary award for prose, the Anasoft litera 2014, has been announced (link in Slovak) and it includes a few Literalab favorites among the 10 books selected out of a total of 194. The shortlisted authors include first timer Uršuľa Kovalyk for Krasojazdkyňa (The Equestrienne). You can read […]
In The Nation there’s a thorough and fantastic article about Bulgarian writer and exiled dissident Georgi Markov titled “A Captivating Mind: How Georgi Markov became the truth-teller of Bulgaria’s communist era, and paid for it with his life.” Playwright, novelist, essayist and journalist, Markov was murdered on orders of the Bulgarian secret service in London […]
The shortlist for the Rossica Translation Prize 2014 has been announced for the best translation from Russian and it’s a pitched battle between five books. Interestingly, only one of the books’ authors is still alive, as one was quite famously killed in a duel (and that in 1837, so he wouldn’t be showing up at […]
The Missing Slate has published an excerpt from the fantastic novel Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book by Slovak writer Daniela Kapitáňová and translated by Julia Sherwood. The book was published in the UK by Garnett Press in 2011 but has yet to find a US publisher. First published in Slovakia in 2000 to great success the […]
“The Romany and their tragicomic lives, the lives of the wheeler-dealers, the inhabitants of settlements and other peculiar characters and figures are the subject matter of the book. The trafficker Ferdy was promised the young and beautiful Sabina as compensation of a debt, but she fled and found the love of her life. The book […]
“As far as I’m aware, none of the big shots in the Third Reich was a sadist. All four committed suicide. Hitler and Goebbels did so even before Germany capitulated. Himmler followed when he realized his captors weren’t going to treat him as an important statesman but rather as a criminal, while the hedonist Goering […]
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