2013 winner of the Magnesia Litera prize for his novel Rybí krev (Fish Blood), Jiří Hájíček will be appearing in London together with his English translator Gale A. Kirking. The event will take place at the Slovak Embassy on October 17. Kirking will read from his translation of Hájíček’s highly successful novel Rustic Baroque (Selský […]
Paradises might be a reimagining of Camus’ Outsider – but in female form and living in 21st-century Buenos Aires. Our narrator allows the hazards of death and chance encounters to lead her through the city, where she sleepwalks into a job in the zoo’s reptile house, and another administering morphine to one of the oddball […]
A lot of the publishers of translated fiction have been weighing in recently on the state of affairs. Now publisher Stefan Tobler takes the occasion of his And Other Stories third anniversary to add his own assessment of the challenges of bringing out legitimately interesting, unique books in the English-speaking world, with its closed-minded philistinism […]
I remember the first time I saw a Romanian movie as a teenager, it was from the Ceaușescu era of course, just as I was from the Reagan one. In fact, my entire teenage years were confined within the great communicator’s two terms in office. Not that I’d compare myself to a victim of a […]
“A hand migrated to the abdomen; the other was on its way to the other iceberg. But the encounter with the left breast was even worse. The coldness, the skin wrinkled over the flesh, made him shiver. And time stopped still again, as if the coldness of the body he was groping had overflowed into […]
The story in Saturday European Fiction this week – “Slow Walking Course” by Uršuľa Kovalyk – contained the same disturbing and darkly humorous combination of the humdrum every day and the magically surreal that I found so striking in the first story of hers I read – “Mrs. Agnes’s Bathroom.” That story was included in […]
Russian writer Dmitri Novoselov recently had his English-language debut in B O D Y with the short story “Alevtina”. Now, with the release of the September 2013 Black Markets issue of Words Without Borders he has another work looking back at the chaotic and often absurd decade in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet […]
B O D Y’s Saturday European Fiction this week was an excerpt from the novel The Swimmers by Joaquín Pérez Azaústre, published today August 27, 2013. The title, and not only the title, is evocative of another very well-known short story and film, “The Swimmer”, written by John Cheever and published in 1964 and brought […]
At Deutsche Welle there is article about the new Berlin-based publisher Frisch & Co. Run by E.J. Van Lanen the e-book publisher is putting out a fascinating selection of novels in translation from Germany, Austria, Spain, Argentina and Italy. I have just read the debut novel they put out by Argentine writer Carlos Busqued, Under […]
On March 7, 2005 the hero of Selvedin Avdić’s brilliant and captivating novel Seven Terrors decides to get up out of bed after nine months of self-imposed apathy as a result of having been left by his wife. Ready to return to life what he actually returns to is horror. Read the book review in […]
literalab 