The 27th Vilenica International Literary Festival runs from September 5 to 9 throughout Slovenia, primarily in the region bordering Italy. “Nomadic writers” is a thematic focus at this year’s festival, with a selection of guests who amply illustrate this tendency. Bekim Sejranović is a writer from Bosnia and Herzegovina who lives in Oslo, Dimitré Dinev […]
The latest Words Without Borders is out: Writing from the Silk Road, featuring fiction, poetry and non-fiction from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Xinjiang, China. Half of the work was actually written in Russian while the other three pieces were translated from Uzbek, Georgian and Uyghur. Exiled Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov, who has a poem […]
Hungarian Literature Online has published the introduction to Miklós Szentkuthy’s Marginalia on Casanova, which is being published in an English translation by Tim Wilkinson by the Contra Mundum Press in September. Szentkuthy’s obscurity in the English-speaking and reading world makes even some of Central Europe’s most obscure writers seems like the stars of their own […]
There are some new magazines out with Central European content. Two Lines: Passageways has Julia Sherwood’s translation of an extract from Slovak writer Ján Rozner’s Seven Days to the Funeral as well as a fantastic selection of Russian poets such as Arseny Tarkovsky (the filmmaker’s father), Velmir Khlebnikov and contemporary Shamshad Abdullaev. To read a […]
Poet and translator from the Hungarian George Szirtes has a wonderful corrective about what he refers to as the “constant and loud debate” regarding the death of the novel. Starting off from the remarks at the Edinburgh Book Festival of poet Jackie Kay that it’s odd that novelists are constantly predicting the end of the […]
“In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” This is Harry Lime’s line of shameless […]
The literary blogosphere has been putting on its collective gas mask, or surgical mask, or whatever kind of mask protects us against epidemics. Jacob Silverman’s article “Against Enthusiasm” deriding the “epidemic of niceness in online book culture” at Slate has been getting around, presumably read, probably even debated a bit. It’s example of everyone’s friend, […]
“The concept of being and non-being is a philosophical con” – Egon Bondy At the Czech Literature Portal I wrote about the fact that you can see a documentary about Czech writer Egon Bondy online for free and with English subtitles. Titled The Last Lesson of Egon Bondy the 32-minute film is full of the […]
Norman Davies wrote about Poland as the Heart of Europe. Now it looks like the country is becoming the beating, bloody force of its newest wave of crime fiction For lovers of European crime fiction tired of reading about another glum, divorced, middle-aged Scandinavian police detective who drinks too much for his/her own good, a […]
Does literature, and specifically reading novels, lead to a more tolerant and non-violent world? This seems to be the argument implied in Elaine Scarry’s unfortunately titled “Poetry Changed the World” in The Boston Review. Scarry writes about “literature’s capacity to reduce harm,” extrapolating her points from Steven Pinker’s much-publicized recent work of scholarly wishful thinking, […]
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