A feminist version of Don Juan, a 900-page work of Greek surrealism that is a mixture of Joyce, Freud and Breton, one of the best Russian novels of the 20th century – and 27 more to go. The European Society of Authors released its third annual Finnegan’s List at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, with […]
Marek Bieńczyk has won Poland’s top literary award for Książka twarzy (A Book of the Face). The Nike Literary Award (Nagroda Literacka NIKE) has been in existence since 1997 and has had Olga Tokarczuk, Wiesław Myśliwski, Jerzy Pilch and Czesław Miłosz among previous winners. Speaking of Miłosz this year’s Audience Award went to Andrzej Franaszek […]
The 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair kicks off on Wednesday and as the world’s largest book fair will have quite a bit of interest in the way of books, writers and publishing talk and news. Just in terms of Central and Eastern European writers there will be writers such as Russian poet and essayist Olga Martynova, […]
At Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s Work in Progress historian Douglas Smith has a fascinating account of the origin, process and ultimate ambiguities he came up against in writing Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy. Beginning with a Connecticut dinner with a descendant of the Sheremetev family and on through accounts of meetings […]
As the ALTA conference goes into day two the European Society of Authors have issued an invitation to build a “literary and intellectual community committed to translation, transmission and mediation of literature in the different languages of the European continent.” Coincidence? Actually, presenting the whole issue as a European vs. American high-stakes competition might be […]
I wrote a brief tribute to translator Michael Henry Heim on Asymptote Journal as I was preparing an interview with him when I learned of his death on September 29. Reading about his singular career and reading so many of the amazing books he translated was and will continue to be a truly inspiring experience. […]
At Russia Beyond the Headlines Alexander Genis asks whether Russia could have a Norton-like anthology of its literature, in spite of all the debate that surrounds these anthologies and the canons they imply. Russia though, especially in the 20th century, presents some unique challenges: “Perhaps, the solution is to end the list at 1917. As […]
The first time I saw the Berg Orchestra perform not long after its founding in 1995 the concert program offered a typical mix of new and old music, with the more familiar fare used to draw audiences to the modern music they were still for the most part unaccustomed to hearing. On that particular evening, […]
Oxford University is the site of a conference on the last two decades of Russian literature titled Decadence or Renaissance? Russian literature since 1991 that starts today. Besides all the academic speakers discussing issues as diverse as the latest wave of Russian and Russian-Jewish emigration, political novels, counter-culture and oil, there are two guest authors […]
“Jasieński clearly believed that new convictions required a new formal approach, and as such he reinvents his language every fifty pages or so, and entirely rethinks how a metaphor might be used … it once seemed logical that a political revolution needed a corresponding revolution in the arts. Now the politics struggle to change while […]
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