“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 […]
The 2022 Winter Issue of B O D Y nears its end with my review of My Seven Lives by Agneša Kalinová and Jana Juráňová, translated from the Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood. The book is an interview memoir that covers Kalinová’s eventful life and is a fascinating reflection of 20th century history in […]
“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 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 […]
“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 […]
“There was a time, long, long ago now, when Michal used to be scared of him. Once he was startled awake in the middle of a hot summer’s night, to find his little brother sitting on his bed, motionless, a dark silhouette. Although he couldn’t see his face, he knew that the little one was […]
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 […]
Fifty years ago, Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia, crushing the liberalization of the Prague Spring. What people today know about the consequences of this usually comes from images on the streets of Prague and from the lives of internationally-known Czech intellectuals like Václav Havel and Milan Kundera. This second excerpt from journalist and translator Agneša […]
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